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


Doğan B.

17th International IDEA Conference: Studies in English, Elazığ, Turkey, Elazığ, Türkiye, 7 - 09 Mayıs 2025, ss.122-123, (Özet Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Elazığ
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.122-123
  • Ankara Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Sally Rooney is engaged in an inclusive worldmaking by creating a textual space for diverse characters 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-millennial concerns like people’s well-being, the soul-destroying effects of consumerism, capitalism, and the planet's future. In Rooney’s tertiary novel Beautiful World the four characters, though having different backgrounds, lifestyles, and beliefs, are in pursuit of making sense of life in their unique ways. The ability to devise a genuine way of holding onto life, being one of the oldest issues raised on the planet, is of interest to Alice disfiguring the importance of fame and wealth as a writer, of Eileen a language editor of a magazine seeking alternative ways to attach herself to a meaningful life by gauging giving birth to a baby, of Simon taking refuge in the performativity of religion and of Felix a worker at a warehouse trying his hand in singing and bisexual 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 media apps like Tinder or WhatsApp. The experience of these flawed characters is variegated and Rooney’s novel promotes inclusiveness by building inextricable generic relations. Taxonomical ways of handling genres might be disaffecting. Still, the book can be seen in the light of a genre fiction due to following some common tropes, an auto-fiction due to Alice and Rooney’s similar concerns about being a well-known author, and meta-fiction for giving insights about the nature of writing and publishing industries.