Sally Rooney's Inclusiveness in Beautiful World Where Are You?

Date

2025-05-07

Author

Doğan, Buket

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Sally Rooney is engaged in an inclusive worldmaking by creating a textual space for diversecharacters and genres. Contemporary Irish women’s writing yields a direct interest in the post-millennial global agenda in the post-Celtic Tiger period steering its attention to post-millennialconcerns like people’s well-being, the soul-destroying effects of consumerism, capitalism, andthe planet's future. In Rooney’s tertiary novel Beautiful World the four characters, thoughhaving different backgrounds, lifestyles, and beliefs, are in pursuit of making sense of life intheir unique ways. The ability to devise a genuine way of holding onto life, being one of theoldest issues raised on the planet, is of interest to Alice disfiguring the importance of fame andwealth as a writer, of Eileen a language editor of a magazine seeking alternative ways to attachherself to a meaningful life by gauging giving birth to a baby, of Simon taking refuge in theperformativity of religion and of Felix a worker at a warehouse trying his hand in singing andbisexual affairs. The novel achieves inclusiveness not only with these various characters’experiences but also by conflating the zeitgeist of the post-millennial spirit with social mediaapps like Tinder or WhatsApp. The experience of these flawed characters is variegated andRooney’s novel promotes inclusiveness by building inextricable generic relations. Taxonomicalways of handling genres might be disaffecting. Still, the book can be seen in the light of a genrefiction due to following some common tropes, an auto-fiction due to Alice and Rooney’s similarconcerns about being a well-known auth

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/114932

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Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar