Ithaca College

Professor Chris Holmes examines the problem and potential of limits in understanding a novel’s relationship to the world, and, in doing so, confronts the limit qua limit as a principal literary form.

All are welcome to join Sigma Tau Delta, the English Honor Society, for its final faculty presentation of the semester.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go presents one of the more interesting test cases for the limits of the novel as world. Its failure to complete its project of imagining a community of clones as the byproduct of a technologically futuristic world allows us to read the clone in two counterintuitive ways: clone as the catastrophic failure of the global community to imagine its others; and, clone as novel, wondrous in its limitations. These two readings of Ishiguro’s clones are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they can be understood as the novel translating back and forth between the world as novel, and novel as world. It is in that liminal space that Ishiguro situates the clone.

 Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Christopher Matusiak at cmatusiak@ithaca.edu.  We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.