Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Literary Form and the Politics of Interpretation
- ‘New World’ Exiles and Ironists from Évariste Parny to Ananda Devi
- ‘… without losing sight of the whole’: Said and Goethe
- Metaphorical Memories: Freud, Conrad and the Dark Continent
- Playing the Field/Performing ‘the Personal’ in Maryse Condé's Interviews
- Writing Subjectivity, Crossing Borders
- Reinventing the Legacies of Genre
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
‘New World’ Exiles and Ironists from Évariste Parny to Ananda Devi
from Literary Form and the Politics of Interpretation
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Literary Form and the Politics of Interpretation
- ‘New World’ Exiles and Ironists from Évariste Parny to Ananda Devi
- ‘… without losing sight of the whole’: Said and Goethe
- Metaphorical Memories: Freud, Conrad and the Dark Continent
- Playing the Field/Performing ‘the Personal’ in Maryse Condé's Interviews
- Writing Subjectivity, Crossing Borders
- Reinventing the Legacies of Genre
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Turned back from turning back
as if a loved country
faced away from the traveler
No pledged premeditated daughter
no cold cold sorrow no barrier
Susan Howe ‘Encloser’ (1990)La terre du retour était celle du premier départ: il y poussait des arbres tonnerre, des falaises de sang et des visages de cristal.
Ananda Devi ‘Absence’ (2003)‘If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices’, states the poet Susan Howe in a remarkable mixed-genre essay that engages with, and interrogates, the politics of form (1990: 180). Entitled ‘Encloser’, the essay meditates on what it means to ‘enclose’, to ‘include’ and canonize texts, to label them ‘narratives of conversion’, say, when their affective charge explodes that cognitive label. Formal generic categories can enable reading, but impede meaning. ‘Poetry shelters other voices’ because it always exceeds its assigned place. It can suddenly erupt and disrupt the grand master narratives of history, the received critical interpretations and social functions of particular texts. Poetry can convey muted experiences and structures of feeling that exist outside of normative contexts, even when it abides by strict formal rules of composition or expression. It resists absorption, but ‘shelters’ other insights, and when it breaks rules of genre and prosody its impact can be unexpected and far-reaching. This is true of the Early American colonial texts that interest Howe as much as it is of the Francophone colonial and postcolonial texts that will be discussed in this essay.
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- Postcolonial PoeticsGenre and Form, pp. 13 - 34Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011
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