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Article published In: English Text Construction
Vol. 8:1 (2015) ► pp.1–20

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Kazuo Ishiguro’s gentle transgression of tradition, myths and stereotypes

Towards a reading of the contemporary in The Remains of the Day

Published online: 10 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.8.1.01nel
The present article aims to provide a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day that focuses on the author’s ‘gentle transgression’ of three local myths become international commodities: the myths of the English butler, the English country house and Englishness itself. It also examines how, in the process, the butler’s identity becomes an increasingly heterogeneous one, a “transindividuality” (Bessière 2010) potentially representative of a sedentary or “rooted” (Appiah 1997) form of critical cosmopolitanism. Ishiguro thus responds to the challenges of globalization, suggesting that a constantly questioned to-and-fro movement between the local and the global, each in turn enriching the other, might prevent the much-feared homogenization of cultures.
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