Let the Great Narrative Spin: A Poetics of Relations

Авторы

  • Laura P. Z. Izarra University of São Paulo

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v14i0.3612

Аннотация

Contemporary art is at a turning point, questioning crystallized
systems of representation and intersubjective relations in order to reconfigure the imaginative framework of people at multiple cultural intersections. Literature is a space which consists of various fractured spaces of knowledge which are simultaneously interconnected. Based upon the renowned physicist David Bohm’s proposal (1992) which points out the way in which thought shapes our perceptions, significations and daily actions, I will analyse Colum McCann’s narrative in Let the Great World Spin (2009) to understand how the writer explores the contemporary “shadows” of the present (Agamben 2006), which manifest themselves in a constant flux of relationships that are triggered by memory and grasped at different levels of perception. I will only focus on the opening of the novel and the closing chapters of the four books, which function as interchapters or intermezzos of the episodes in the lives of the various characters which are narrated in between; the life of Corrigan seen mainly through the eyes of his brother Ciaran is the main line of the narrative which is intersected by other narratives. Colum McCann’s art of writing discloses a different treatment of literary elements and concepts in transition, requiring a theoretical approach
that apprehends contemporary literature in its complexity. Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” (1990) - both aesthetic and political - helps to understand McCann’s literary strategies of telling, connecting and constructing parallel consciousness of self and surroundings in order to transform mentalities and reshape societies.

Биография автора

  • Laura P. Z. Izarra, University of São Paulo
    Laura P.Z. Izarra is Associate Professor of Literatures in English, Coordinator of W.B. Yeats Chair of Irish Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Social Sciences, University of São Paulo, former Chair of the Society of Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS) and Chair of the Brazilian Association of Irish Studies (ABEI). She is the author of Mirrors and Holographic Labyrinths: The Process of a ‘New’ Aesthetic Synthesis in the Novels of John Banville (International Scholars Publications, NY, 1999) 

    and Narrativas de la diáspora irlandesa bajo la Cruz del Sur (Corregidor, Argentina, 2010); editor of various books such as the series Da Irlanda para o Brasil (2009 & 2011) and Roger Casement in Brazil: Rubber, the Amazon and the Atlantic World.1884-1916 by Angus Mitchell (2010; Portuguese trans. by Mariana Bolfarine 2011). She is
    co-editor with Munira H. Mutran of Kaleidoscopic Views of Ireland (2003), Irish Studies in Brazil (2005), and the ABEI Journal – The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies since 1999, and with Beatriz K.X. Bastos of A New Ireland in Brazil (2008) and with Mutran & Bastos of A Garland of Words: For Maureen O’Rourke Murphy (2010). She has published widely on postcolonial literatures and criticism and on Irish Studies, mainly on the Irish diaspora in South America.

Опубликован

2012-11-17

Выпуск

Раздел

Fiction and Autobiography

Как цитировать

Izarra, L. P. Z. (2012). Let the Great Narrative Spin: A Poetics of Relations. ABEI Journal, 14, 79-88. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v14i0.3612