A Poetics Of Relation

A major work by this prominent Caribbean author and philosopher, available for the first time in English

A Poetics of Relation fosters a dialogue across islands and languages between established and lesser-known authors, bringing together archipelagic and diasporic voices from the Francophone and Hispanic Antilles. In this pan-diasporic study, Ferly shows that a comparative analysis of female narratives is often most pertinent across linguistic zones.

This marks the publication of the first English-language translation of Poetic Intention, Glissant’s classic meditation on poetry and art. In this wide-ranging book, Glissant discusses poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Saint-John Perse, and visual artists, such as the Surrealist painters Matta and Wilfredo Lam, arguing for the importance of the global position of art. He states that a poem, in its intention, must never deny the “way of the world.” Capacious, inventive, and unique, Glissant’s Poetic Intention creates a new landscape for understanding the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

After Aboriginal author Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria, won the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, it rapidly achieved the status of a classic. The novel is widely read and studied in Australia, and overseas, and valued for its imaginative power, its epic reach, and its remarkable use of language. Indigenous Transnationalism brings together eight essays by critics from seven different countries, each analysing Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria from a distinct national perspective. Taken together, these diverse voices highlight themes from the novel that resonate across cultures and continents: the primacy of the land; the battles that indigenous peoples fight for their language, culture and sovereignty; a concern with the environment and the effects of pollution. At the same time, by comparing the Aboriginal experience to that of other indigenous peoples, they demonstrate the means by which a transnational approach can highlight resistance to, or subversion of, national prejudices.

What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection? Constance M. Furey probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a solitary search for God. As Furey demonstrates, John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others describe inner lives that are surprisingly crowded, teeming with human as well as divine companions. The same early modern writers who bequeathed to us the modern distinction between self and society reveal here a different way of thinking about selfhood altogether. For them, she argues, the self is neither alone nor universally connected, but is forever interactive and dynamically constituted by specific relationships. By means of an analysis equally attentive to theological ideas, social conventions, and poetic form, Furey reveals how poets who understand introspection as a relational act, and poetry itself as a form ideally suited to crafting a relational self, offer us new ways of thinking about selfhood today—and a resource for reimagining both secular and religious ways of being in the world.

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Glissant has written extensively in French about the colonial experience in the Caribbean. Britton (French, Aberdeen U., Scotland) situates Glissant within ongoing debates in postcolonial theory, making connections between his novels and theoretical work and the work of Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhanha, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Focusing on language and subjectivity, discussion moves between analysis of Glissant's theoretical work and detailed readings of his novels. Major themes central to his writing, such as the reappropriation of history, standard and vernacular language, and the colonial construction of the Other, are addressed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR