Literature's Sensuous Geographies Postcolonial Matters of Place

by Moslund, Sten Pultz

• ISBN13: 9781137479679
• ISBN10: 1137479671
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-03-12
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Using place studies within a postcolonial context, Literature's Sensuous Geographies explores the sense-aesthetic dimensions, such as smell and sound, in literature. Moslund uses "sensuous geographies" to open up other than discursive relations to the world. In close-readings of Conrad, Blixen, Coetzee and Achebe, among others, this book challenges the rationalizing logic of modernity and shifts the field of postcolonial studies and geocriticism from discourse analysis to aesthetic analysis.

Author Biography

Sten Pultz Moslund is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and English Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. His research focuses on postcolonial literature and theory, migration literature, and cultural hybridity, and, most recently, on the relation between place, literature, and aesthetics. Among other works, Moslund has published Migration Literature and Hybridity (2010) and co-edited the anthology The Culture of Migration: Politics, Aesthetics and Histories (forthcoming).

Table of Contents

Introduction
PART I
1. The Tenor of Place, Language and Body in Postcolonial Studies
2. Sensuous Empires and Silent Calls of the Earth
3. Postcolonial Aesthetics and the Politics of the Sensible
4. How to Read Place in Literature with the Body: Language as Poiesis-Aisthesis
PART II
5. Mind, Eye, Body and Place in J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands (1974)
6. Silent Geographies in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902)
7. Nation and Embodied Experiences of the Place World in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958)
8. Karen Blixen's Out of Africa (1937): A Colonial Aesthetic and Decolonial Aisthesis
9. The Settler's Language and Emplacement in Patrick White's Voss (1957)
10. Place, Language, Body in the Caribbean Experience and the Example of Harold Sonny Ladoo's No Pain Like This Body (1972)
11. Place and Sensuous Geographies in Migration Literature
12. Spatial Transgressions and Migrant Aesthetics in David Dabydeen's Disappearance (1993)
Coda