Treatise On The Whole World

This exciting, challenging book covers a wide range of subjects, linked together through the key ideas of diversity and 'Relation'. It sees our modern world, shaped by immigration and colonialism, as a multiplicity of communities interacting and evolving, and opposes all attempts to impose uniformity, universal or absolute values.

This collection of interviews is a diamond, remarkable in the way that it assembles so many of the major strains of Glissant’s thought, and stunning in the expansive erudition at work in the composition of that thought. Two structuring experiences inform the writer’s reflections on language and poetic engagement. On the one hand, there is the acculturation of his French intellectual ancestry, begun in the Martinican colonial system and continued in his mature student years in Paris, with the achievement of a Doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1980. On the other, there is his genetic heritage as an Antillean, nurtured in the Creole language of a people whose nearly forgotten history he will take pains to redeem. A lifelong interrogation of these two vital experiences of language are crucial to Glissant’s concept of Relation, viewed as a transformative and vital process intrinsic to the project of poetics. Relation reverberates throughout Glissant’s consideration of the many topics broached in this volume: medieval Europe and the creation of nation-states, the evolution of the epic and its global iterations, decolonization, creolization, landscapes and cultures, political engagement vs. the task of the writer, globality, questions of identity and Being. Absolutely the best introduction to Glissant’s thought.

Neal Stephenson follows his highly-praised historical novels, Quicksilver and The Confusion, with the extraordinary third and final volume of the Baroque Cycle. The year is 1714. Daniel Waterhouse has returned to England, where he joins forces with his friend Isaac Newton to hunt down a shadowy group attempting to blow up Natural Philosophers with 'Infernal Devices' - time bombs. As Daniel and Newton conspire, an increasingly vicious struggle is waged for England's Crown: who will take control when the ailing queen dies? Tories and Whigs clash as one faction jockeys to replace Queen Anne with 'The Pretender' James Stuart, and the other promotes the Hanoverian dynasty of Princess Caroline. Meanwhile, a long-simmering dispute between Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz comes to a head, with potentially cataclysmic consequences. Wildly inventive, brilliantly conceived, The System of the World is the final volume in Neal Stephenson's hugely ambitious and compelling saga. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters in a time of genius, discovery and change, the Baroque Cycle is a magnificent and unique achievement.

This book consists of four lectures and six interviews; it covers a wide range of topics central to Glissant's thought - such as creolization, langage, culture and identity, 'atavistic' versus 'composite cultures' - presented in a particularly accessible form because here Glissant interacts with the views of other people.