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"Literature's Sensuous Geographies offers a study of place in postcolonial literature and theory from other than the socio-cultural and political angles that have traditionally dominated the field. Moslund explores "sensuous geographies" (something that has so far been neglected in the study of place in literature) as opening up other than discursive relations to the world - other, non-territorial modes of being-in-the-world. The book develops a sense-aesthetic mode of reading (a "topo-poetics") and in close-readings of Conrad, Blixen, Coetzee and Achebe (among others), Moslund explores dimensions in literature that open up the place world as produced by desubjectified intensities of smell, sound, sight, touch, etc. Sense-aesthetic qualities of literary language are shown in this way as radically challenging the rationalizing logic of modernity (the inner logic of imperialism), at the heart of which Moslund identifies a disciplining of the senses and a reduction of the sensuous openness of reality. With his study of sensuous geographies in literature, Moslund makes a notable shift in the field of postcolonial studies and geocriticism from discourse analysis to aesthetic analysis"--
List 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
About the author
Sten Pultz Moslund is Associate Professor in the department of Comparative Literature in the Institute for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark.
Report
"This is a fascinating extension of the postcolonial concern with place. Moslund takes the theme of the conflicted construction of place into new territory grounding the interrelation of place, body, language, and aesthetics in new readings of some of the key texts in the field." - Bill Ashcroft, Australian Professorial Fellow of the Arts and Media, the University of New South Wales, Australia
