Resisting Alterities

Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness
Erscheinungsjahr 2004
ISBN: 978-90-420-1200-4
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 71, 255 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 472 g

Reihe: Cross/Cultures

This volume – of essays, poetry, and prose fiction – records various attempts to read the fracture zones created by the discursive strategy of a democratic imagination, where space and ideas are opened to new linguistic and literary insights. Pride of place is taken by essays on the Caribbean writer Wilson Harris which explore the implications of his awareness of a polyphony of coexistent voices that dislodges the hegemony of Cartesian dualism. This group of studies is rounded off with an interview with, and searching testimony by, Harris himself.

The further contributions take up the implications of the encounter with ‘alterity’ (strangers, natives, barbarians) in order to underline not only wonder in the face of an unknown presence, or the ‘shame’ through which the subject discovers itself, but also the ressentiment involved in the creation of demonized Others.

As the poet Charles Tomlinson states, “what we take to be otherness, alterity, can be readmitted into our literary consciousness and seen as part of the whole, causing us to readjust our awareness of the possibilities of English.” These essays confirm that resistance is an interface of ambivalence between discursive worlds, encouraging us to read the “living network” of a text contrapuntally.
Specific topics include Billy Bragg and New Labour, Schopenhauer in Britain, Objectivist poetry, gender and sexual identity (in Nancy Cunard; in Scottish fiction), multivocal discourse in South Africa, specific forms of alterity (in Jamaica Kincaid; in the poetry of Edwin Morgan; in allosemitism) and the deculturalizing perils of globalization.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Fazzini, Marco

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Marco FAZZINI: Introduction: The Jesting Masks of Resistance
PART ONE
Wilson HARRIS: Resistances to Alterities
Marina CAMBONI: Resisting Fearful Symmetry: Wilson Harris’s Bridges of Language
Monica POZZI: When the Other is Wilson Harris
Hena MAES-JELINEK: ‘Otherness’ in Wilson Harris’s Fiction: The Dark Jester
Marina CAMBONI and Marco FAZZINI: An Interview with Wilson Harris in Macerata
INTERMEZZO: THE WRITERS’ VOICE
Eugenio de SIGNORIBUS from Principle of the Day (translated by Christopher Whyte)
Douglas DUNN: Self-Portraits (Rembrandt); Chateau Dairsie
Wilson HARRIS from The Mask of the Beggar
Armando PAJALICH from Songs of Penelope & of Gilgamesh (translated by Rosanna Warren)
Charles TOMLINSON: The Holy Man; Cotswold Journey 2001
Christopher WHYTE: After the Battle; What the Clay Said to the Potter (translated by Christopher Whyte)
PART TWO
Patrick WILLIAMS: Not Looking for a New (Labour) England: Billy Bragg, Kipling, and Ressentiment
Luisa VILLA: ‘Desisting Resistance’: The Representation of Schopenhauerian Pessimism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain
Charles TOMLINSON: Objectivism: William Carlos Williams and Basil Bunting
Renata MORRESI: Negotiating Identity: Nancy Cunard’s Otherness

Über Autor(innen)

MARCO FAZZINI teaches English literature at the University of Ca’ Foscari (Venice). He has translated selections from the poetry of Douglas Livingstone, Philip Larkin, Norman MacCaig, Hugh MacDiarmid and Charles Tomlinson, and is co-editor and translator of Scottish (1992) and South African (1994) poetry. His most recent publications include Crossings: Essays on Contemporary Scottish Poetry and Hybridity (2000) and a book on Geoffrey Hill (2002).