Complicit Text

Ivan Stacy is associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University.

• Acknowledgments IntroductionChapter 1. Complicit Silences: Albert Camus Chapter 2. The Trap of Totalitarianism: Milan KunderaChapter 3. Consolation and Complicity: Kazuo IshiguroChapter 4. Traces of Complicity: W. G. SebaldChapter 5. Paranoid Conspiracy: Thomas PynchonChapter 6. Compromised Narratives: Margaret Atwood’s DystopiasConclusionBibliography

In this ground-breaking study, Ivan Stacy reassesses the significance of complicity, as a kind of responsibility beyond that of a bystander, yet not quite that of a perpetrator, within a cultural context. He does so by means of careful and convincing analyses of novels that make visible failures to confront or even to acknowledge wrong-doing, in contexts ranging from the Holocaust and the Cold War to ecological emergency and the injustices of neoliberalism. This study is as timely as it is innovative, on a topic that concerns us all.