Rethinking Place through Literary Form

Description

Rethinking Place Through Literary Form regards the relationship between place and linguistic form as challenging real and perceived configurations of place and renegotiating geopolitically determined categories of the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. The volume argues that the rise of scattered communities, displaced physically and psychologically by urban and alienated geographies, necessitates linguistic negotiations of one’s locatedness in place as the chief means of uncovering and re-building identity. By looking at narrative re-imaginings of forgotten and interrupted intimacies between habitation and place from diverse parts of the world, the twelve chapters address the growing need to expand and alter approaches to literary representations of modernity and modes of self-location.  Foreword: Theorizing Place as World Polis and Multiple Form Series Editor’s Preface Praise for Rethinking Place through Literary Form Contents Notes on Contributors Chapter 1: Introduction: The Interconnectedness of Place and Literary Form Rethinking the Transnational The Influence of Place on Form Formal Reconfigurations of Place Works Cited Part I: The Influence of Place on Form: Literary Form and the Displacement of Locales Chapter 2: Othered Places and the Bengali Leftist Female Bildungsroman: Sulekha Sanyal’s Nabankur and the Pre-Independence Communist Everyday The Methodological Problems Locating Nabankur Critical Domestic Geography and the Crumbling Feudal Home “Ghastly Spectacle” of the Famine: Contextualizing the Relief-Kitchen The Relief Kitchen: Locus of Chhobi’s Political Labor Works Cited Chapter 3: Island of Words: The De-Realization of Place in the Writings of George Mackay Brown Neolithic Writing George Mackay Brown, Travellers Magnus Works Cited Chapter 4: Locating Statelessness: The Multiple Forms of Anarchist Utopia in B. Traven’s The Death Ship The Death Ship’s Critique of the Interchangeable State Interlude among the Spanish Anarchists The Open Sea as a Zone of Refuge Works Cited Part II: The Influence of Place on Form: Neighbourhoods, Homes and Remakings of Form Chapter 5: “Earthquakes or Earthmovers”: Place Memory and Literary Counterspace in Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them Mexican American East L.A. No one in the Eastside believed in paper The neighbors itched like phantom limbs Text as Barrio, Barrio as Text: Their Dogs Came with Them as Place Memory Works Cited Chapter 6: “A House with Many Rooms”: Transformed Homes in Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names Roots and Rootlessness: A Tale of Two Continents Dreaming Close to Home Dashed Dreams, Reconfigured Realities “A House with Many Rooms” Works Cited Part III: Formal Reconfigurations of Place: Regions, Nations, and Formal (Dis)junctions Chapter 7: “Her Strong Roots Sink Down”: Displacement, Migration, and Form in Jean Toomer’s Cane Migration and Meaning Root Systems Uproot Systems Works Cited Chapter 8: De-Provincializing Liolà: Pirandello, Futurism, and the Dialectics of Revision in Gramsci’s Cultural Writings The Mobility of Liolà, Against the Sicilies Manufactured for Export The Late Mattia Pascal: The Regularity of the Novel Form and the Contingency of Place Liolà: The Language of the Play and the Paradoxes of Provincial Identity The Dialectics of Luigi Pirandello Works Cited Chapter 9: “And No One Talks of National Rebirth”: Liberal Humanist Interventionism in the Post-Imperial Space of D.J. Enright’s Poetry After MacArthur “Repressed Dreams of Impossible Feudal Beauties” Turning Away Works Cited Part IV: Formal Reconfigurations of Place: Discursive Cities and Transitory Worlds Chapter 10: “No New Newark”: Rewriting Place through the Failed Form of Family Romance in Philip Roth’s The Anatomy Lesson The Social Father’s Ur-Text The Unwritten Maternal Failing to Rewrite the Social Father’s Law Writing the Body Works Cited Chapter 11: The Invisible City of the Creole Caribbean Takes Shape: A Discourse Between Italo Calvino and Édouard Glissant Works Cited Chapter 12: Locating the World in the Prose Poems of Peter Riley “Voices Lost in the Falling Edge” “/frustration and anger/a world emotion/” “close bracket, close life, close episode” “a stone turns/ a tone returns” Works Cited Index