This article considers Claudia Rankine’s representation of racial violence and the culture of white supremacy in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and Citizen: An American Lyric. Beginning ...from her conviction of the fundamental connection between white supremacist thinking and the enclosure of black life within the social death of slavery, it explores the consequences for both black and white identity of white fantasies of absolute sovereignty. Central to Rankine’s elaboration of these questions, the article maintains, is her virtuosic reconfiguring of lyric form to expose the ideological and discursive mechanisms that organise American racial reality.
James Joyce: A Critical Guide presents a full and comprehensive account of the major writing of the great modernist novelist James Joyce. Ranging right across Joyce's literary corpus from his ...earliest artistic beginnings to his mature prose masterpieces Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the book provides detailed textual analysis of each of his major works. It also provides an extended discussion of the biographical, historical, political and social contexts that inform Joyce's writing and a wide-ranging discussion of the multiple strands of Joyce criticism that have established themselves over the last eighty years. The book's combination of sustained close reading of individual texts and critical breadth makes it an ideal companion for both undergraduate students and the wider community of Joyce's readers. Key Features:*An extended discussion of Joyce's life, times and historical milieu*Detailed close readings of each of Joyce's major literary works*A thorough critical introduction to the style, plot and characterisation of Finnegans Wake*A comprehensive guide to the critical reception of Joyce's work
Michael Ondaatje Spinks, Lee
2013., 20130719, 2009, 2009-08-03, 2013-07-19
eBook
Michael Ondaatje is the first comprehensive and fully up-to-date study of Ondaatje's entire oeuvre. Starting from Ondaatje's beginnings as a poet, this volume offers an intensive account of each of ...his major publications, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, drawing attention to the various contexts and intertexts that have informed his work. The book contains a broad overview of Ondaatje's career for students and readers coming to his work for the first time. It also offers an original reading of his writing which significantly revises conventional accounts of Ondaatje as a postmodern or postcolonial writer. As the fullest account of Ondaatje's work to date, Spinks's approach draws on a range of postcolonial theory and, as well as being a landmark in Ondaatje scholarship, makes a distinctive contribution to debates about postcolonial literature and the poetics of postmodernism.
This article examines Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead in dialogue with her speculative reflection upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology to read the novel as a radically ambivalent text which exposes ...an aporia at the core of the Reverend Ames's Christian ethics. This ambivalence appears in the way that Ames's version of his own family history works assiduously to expiate the perceived violence done to ethics by his grandfather's support for abolitionist violence while remaining haunted by the thought that in the unforgiving context of Bleeding Kansas simply to insist upon an absolute distinction between violence on the one hand and ethics and law on the other may be irreconcilable with the workings of good faith and the ends of justice. Reinterpreting Ames's narrative in the light of Jacques Derrida's reflection on the paradoxical structure of ethical responsibility, the article argues that the violence done to Ames's ethical reflection by the memory of the grandfather, John Brown, and the excluded black body reveals the agonistic location of the ethics of abolitionist history between two kinds of violence on the uncertain border between justice and law which defines the ground of every genuinely ethical decision.
Throughout the sequence, however, Halpern works assiduously to eliminate the geopolitical and social distance between "here" and "there" that underwrites these voyeuristic satisfactions by bringing ...the war back home into the "nonsite" of our own civic space. ...as the poem proceeds the presiding image of the ruined and dematerialised body comes simultaneously to connote the physical leavings of flayed and wasted flesh and the destitution of the domestic body politic by an ideological nexus which reorganises the defence of democratic values around the conceptual merging of war and security. To be a living effect of synchronies of organization and command is to be overlooked in a double sense: both surveyed and ignored. Because these "synchronies" are the structural linchpin of an emerging global order which is fundamentally hostile to national sovereignty and borders, Halpern once again blurs the geo-political co-ordinates of his "suites" so that Iraq does time for America, America doubles as Iraq: There being no natural catastrophes the market Nature's driving force my body being its exTension and another disaster this one Absence being outmoded thought Material waste sounds I can't Hear the things I see: - no wood, no work, no water- The drowned and the bombed - what don't exist can't be buried. To find ourselves embedded within this "crude" economic matrix is to inhabit a version of the common in which our "capacity" for self-actualisation and social solidarity is, as Halpern's lineation suggests, hollowed out from within by the "city's" implacable pursuit of profits (the phrase "poor putsch" deftly linking the flow of transnational capital to the erosion of democratic sovereignty). Because we are constantly encouraged to express our individuality and capacity for human feeling in commoditised terms, a paradoxical feature of the recasting of civic space in capital's own image, Halpern points out, is the emergence of a public sphere devoid of the relative autonomy from economic and political control the term usually implies. By so closely correlating his faith in a new political common with the "missing being" that makes being-in-common possible as such, Halpern turns the experience of disaster to another and better account which discerns a utopian horizon in the apparently ruinous perception that "what don't exist can't be buried" (DS 55). Because Halpern's lyric project invests so much imaginative energy in attempting to break the "spell of resemblance" between the contents of common life and the systems of power that work to reproduce those contents in their own distorted image, he has sometimes been critical of a tendency in his own writing towards "an all too familiar irony" which "dispenses fatally with the promising gap between tenses" through which we might discern the outline of another possible community by projecting his poetic statements into a terminal future "as if what will have happened were what is already happening now" (DS 81).
“An Imaginative Life: An Interview with David Malouf” presents a wide-ranging discussion of a number of Malouf's major works. Commencing with a consideration of Malouf's personal and artistic ...beginnings, the interview explores his own sense of his position as an Australian (and a regional Australian) writer, the thematic and stylistic development of his craft as a writer of prose, the development of his distinctive novelistic voice, the place of mythology and historical memory in his fiction, his sense of the relationship between landscape and language and the complex constitution of the character of the Australian settler located as it is between a residual fidelity to the Old World and its presence in a new and other place.
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