Poetics of Relation - Softcover

Glissant, Édouard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472066293 ISBN 13: 9780472066292

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 1997

Synopsis

In Poetics of Relation, Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the Antilles as enduring suffering imposed by history, yet as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. This translation of Glissant's work preserves the resonating quality of his prose and makes the richness and ambiguities of his voice accessible to readers in English.

About this title

Review:

"The most important theoretician from the Caribbean writing today. . . . He is central not only to the burgeoning field of Caribbean studies, but also to the newly flourishing literary scene in the French West Indies."
--Judith Graves Miller, University of Wisconsin, Madison

-- (04/07/1999)

"Poetics of Relation is a must read. How rewarding to find a text in the last moments of this century that has absorbed quantum physics, jazz, modernist poetics, mathematics, and all for the sake of adding to the discourse of our planetary reality. . . . Beautifully, Glissant leaves behind the decrepit vocabulary of the sterile paradigm, and invents concepts logically parallel to those in other fields--like relations to relativity--in order to observe Caribbean and global communities in a fresh way. . . . Poetics of Relation seizes the reader who seeks to be challenged, whose openness will embrace the dichotomy between the 'Closed Place' and 'Open World.'"
--MultiCultural Review

-- (04/01/1999)

"How rewarding to read a text in the last moments of this century that has absorbed quantum physics, jazz, modernist poetics, mathematics, and all for the sake of adding to the discourse of our planetary reality. "
--Zoe Anglesey, Multicultural Review

-- (04/01/1999)

"Betsy Wing has made a fine job of rendering the specificities of Glissant's poetic vocabulary. For this poet's prose, and French poet's prose, written in an idiom which is felt as so foreign to English that it can evoke reactions of exasperation and impatience. . . . Glissant's influence on the next, third, generation of francophone writers, and not just Martinican writers, can hardly be overstated."
--Times Literary Supplement

-- (04/01/1999)

". . . translation at its best: in this work the translator stands out as a very competent language and culture scholar, an erudite thinker, a sharp critic, and a very sensitive interpreter."
--Research in African Literatures

-- (04/01/1999)

From the Back Cover:

In Poetics of Relation, French-Caribbean writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant turns the concrete particulars of Caribbean reality into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. He sees the islands of the Antilles as enduring an "invalid" suffering imposed by history, yet also as a place whose unique interactions will one day produce an emerging global consensus. Arguing that the writer alone can tap the unconscious of a people and apprehend its multiform culture in order to provide forms of memory and intent capable of transcending "nonhistory", Glissant therefore defines his "poetics of relation" - both aesthetic and political - as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. In Poetics of Relation, we come to see that relation in all its senses - telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings - is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies. The issues raised about identity as built in relation and not in isolation are central to current discussions not only of Caribbean creolization but of U.S. multiculturalism as well.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0472066293
• ISBN 13: 9780472066292
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256