Polysituatedness - Kinsella, John

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Résumé :

Polysituatedness is concerned with the complexities of defining place, of observing and seeing place, and how we might write a poetics of place. It argues for a 'polysituatedness' of presence, in which all places we have been part of (lived in, visited, stayed in, inherited, even imagined) become enmeshed with a sense of belonging (or not) and posits an alternative model for participation in community and landscape. It does this in the context of a world-view of 'international regionalism', in which international lines of communication are seen to enhance regionality.

From Kathy Acker to indigenous Australian poet Jack Davis, the book touches on other writers and theorists, but in essence is a hands-on praxis book of poetic practice, using essays, journal entries, review and commentary on writing and ecology. Considering modes of belonging and community ('agoras') in conjunction with issues of isolation, the book traces a journey from 'home' at Jam Tree Gully in wheatbelt Western Australia, via a range of personal experiences and intertextual interactions/readings with other works, to Schull, in West Cork, Ireland, where a consideration of belonging and land is read through ancestral displacement via famine and the politics of empire. However, this is not a work of history, but of subjectivity as it affects ways of seeing. It is also about the making of poems out of place, and questions the politics of making and the politics of place...

Biographie:
John Kinsella is Professor of Literature and Sustainability at Curtin University and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University...

Sommaire:
This book is concerned with the complexities of defining 'place', of observing and 'seeing' place, and how we might write a poetics of place. From Kathy Acker to indigenous Australian poet Jack Davis, the book touches on other writers and theorists, but in essence is a hands-on 'praxis' book of poetic practice. The work extends John Kinsella's theory of 'international regionalism' and posits new ways of reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the person occupies place. It provides alternative readings of writers through place and space, especially Australian writers, but also non-Australian. Further, close consideration is given to being of 'famine-migrant' Irish heritage and the complexities of 'returning'. A close-up examination of 'belonging' and exclusion is made on a day-to-day basis. The book offers an approach to creating poems and literary texts constituted by experiencing multiple places, developing a model of polyvalent belonging known as 'polysituatedness'. It works as a companion volume to Kinsella's earlier Manchester University Press critical work, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape to Lyricism....