Options
Tan, Ian
- PublicationMetadata onlyWallace Stevens in theoryThe modernist poetry of Wallace Stevens is replete with moments of theorizing. Stevens regarded poetry as an abstract medium through which to think about and theorize not only philosophical concepts like metaphor and reality, but also a unifying thesis about the nature of poetry itself. At the same time, literary theorists and philosophers have often turned to Stevens as a canonical reference point and influence. In the centenary year of Wallace Stevens's first collection Harmonium (1923), this collection asks what it means to theorize with Stevens today. Through a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this book seeks to describe the myriad kinds of thinking sponsored by Stevens's poetry and explores how contemporary literary theory might be invigorated through readings of Stevens.
64 - PublicationMetadata onlyWallace Stevens and the contemporary Irish novel
Wallace Stevens and the Contemporary Irish Novel is a major contribution to the study of the literary influence of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens. Stevens’s lifelong poetic quest for order and the championing of the creative affordances of the imagination finds compelling articulation in the positioning of the Irish novel as a response to larger legacies of Anglo-American modernism, and how aesthetic re-imagining can be possible in the aftermath of the destruction of certainties and literary tradition heralded by postmodern practice and metatextual consciousness. It is this book’s argument that intertextual influences flowing from Stevens’s poetry towards the vitality of the novelistic imagination enact robust dialectical exchanges between existential chaos and artistic order, contemporary form and poetic precursors. Through readings of novels by important contemporary Irish novelists John Banville, Colum McCann, Ed O’Loughlin, Iris Murdoch, and Emma Donoghue, this book contemporizes Stevens’s literary influence with refence to novelistic style, themes, and thematic preoccupations that stake the claim for the international status of the contemporary Irish novel as it shapes a new understanding of “world literature” as exchange between national languages, cultures, and alternative formulations of aesthetic modernity as continuing project.
64 - PublicationMetadata onlyUnderstanding Barbara Kingsolver
In Understanding Barbara Kingsolver, Ian Tan situates Kingsolver's oeuvre in an ecocritical and ecofeminist context and argues that her work puts forward an ethics of difference that informs a more egalitarian vision of the world. Following a brief biography, Tan explores ecocriticism as a literary strategy and analyzes Kingsolver's early nonfiction book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983, as an entry point to her thematic interests. Subsequent chapters attend to Kingsolver's nine novels, including her breakout The Poisonwood Bible and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead, and the ways they engage with some of the most important issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including postcolonialism and climate change. This book shows how Kingsolver gives her readers the aesthetic tools to begin to see the familiar and the ordinary in a different light, allowing idealism to enrich our everyday lives.
4 - PublicationOpen AccessThe poesis and politics of English-es in Singapore: Intersubjective worlding in the poetry of Joshua Ip and Hamid RoslanThis research article discusses developments in contemporary Anglophone Singapore poetry where a proliferation of writers' groups and literary initiatives has led to efforts to define a localized Anglophone poetic tradition. Focusing on the debut collections of two young poets, Joshua Ip and Hamid Roslan, we argue that the presence of Singlish in their work functions as a site of hermeneutical openness that challenges a neocolonial articulation of Singaporean cultural formations centered on ideologies of standardized English usage, which have homogenized ethnic identities and supported a narrative of national progress. This article theorizes the heteroglossic potentialities of the intersubjective lifeworld found in Ip's and Hamid's poetics by discussing how they eschew any naturalized relationship between language as a semiotic system and sociohistorical being, in favor of a renewed query into Anglophone writing as an accumulation of asymmetrical and uneasy cultural relations.
Scopus© Citations 1 77 349 - PublicationEmbargo
84 14 - PublicationMetadata onlyWallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger: Poetry as appropriative proximityAnalyzes the entire oeuvre of Stevens’s poetry using the philosophical framework of Martin Heidegger. Opens up Stevens’s language to themes and questions concerning phenomenology and hermeneutics Explores the link between philosophy, American poetry, and modernist poetics.
70 - PublicationOpen AccessRefining themselves into existence: Reading Portrait with Terence Davies' filmic portraitureJames Joyce’s Ovidian epigraph to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Seamus Deane, Penguin, 1992) not only foregrounds Stephen Dedalus’ mythic link to the figure of the artificer who is able to translate intellectual striving into artistic expression, but also promises a theory of the aesthetic as applied to the novel’s objective form. However, little attempt has been made to read the novel as adumbrating a Joycean visual praxis which moves beyond cinematic stylistics towards thematic resonances between narrative progression and a phenomenological understanding of the filmic image. This essay will read Joyce’s novel with Terence Davies’ cinematic portrait of his family and social background Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies, Distant Voices, Still Lives. DVD, British Film Institute, 1988), in order to demonstrate how both novel and film undertake a crucial aesthetic sublation in which artistic vision is produced out of the materiality of existence. Through a reading of the aesthetics of temporal selfhood embodied in the literary and filmic media of both, I argue for a comparative analysis of narrative which evokes and sustains modes of understanding that demonstrate the important connection between temporality and identity.
Scopus© Citations 1 103 112 - PublicationEmbargoLiterary phenomenology and the historicity of the lifeworld: Personal and public crisis in Edmund Husserl and Ian McEwan's lessonsThis essay argues for the relevance of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological method as applied to Ian McEwan’s presentation of private crisis and public history in his novel Lessons. Both Husserl and McEwan advocate for the judicious use of reason and rational inquiry in the direction of politics and culture. I demonstrate how McEwan’s literary representation of consciousness in the context of a life lived amid historical change draws near to a practice of phenomenology, while also probing some difficulties in achieving the neutrality of the transcendental standpoint because of McEwan’s complex evocation of memory, repressed desire, and the uncertain image of the past.
13 - PublicationOpen AccessIan McEwan's aesthetic stakes in adaptation as political rewriting: A study of Nutshell (2016) and The Cockroach (2019)This essay will examine two of Ian McEwan’s recent novellas as political rewritings of William Shakespeare and Franz Kafka. McEwan’s Nutshell (2016) repositions the avenger figure in Hamlet as an unborn child whose melancholic awareness of the condition of modern existence allows him a mode of ironic commentary about the possibilities of moral and political choices in a world soon to be destroyed by climate change and nuclear apocalypse. The Cockroach (2019) turns Kafkaesque absurdity into political satire as the protagonist-turned-insect first encountered in The Metamorphosis (1915) is arrogated a position of absolute power in a fictional dystopia eerily resonant of Britain on the verge of Brexit. I argue that McEwan’s re-scripting of these two works of canonical literature imbues his narratives with political resonance, as the formulations and distortions of the physical body in his two novellas map onto the articulations of political belief. In effect, McEwan posits the Foucaultian notion that the body is determined by symbolic systems of power. However, he succeeds in turning the gaze back onto the political by instantiating the radical dimension of a subject whose coming into being is already a political act and event. In other words, McEwan’s artistic intervention in rewriting the narratives of Hamlet and Gregor Samsa explodes the hermeticism of the family drama in the originals by relocating the theatre of subjectivity within the sphere of the political.
WOS© Citations 1Scopus© Citations 1 115 291 - PublicationOpen AccessThe contemporary novel’s containment of multitudes: Poetic citation and intertextual framing in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen DaysThis essay explores the novelistic practice of poetic citation as a response to literary influence and the continuing relevance of poetic insight with respect to the contemporary novel’s concern with the value of literature in the political present. I argue for a new understanding of the exchange of textual energies between poetry and the novel as a dislodging and reframing of frames of reading, a critical perspective that best reflects the impact of the event of catastrophe on the novel’s registering of trauma and the marking of wounded bodies and psyches. Through an analysis of Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days, I present two opposed novelistic investments in poetry and literary tradition, differences that hinge upon the need to enlist poetic truth in favor of a consolidation of ethical vision. I examine the ways and extent through which poetry resists this outside appropriation by articulating its urgent truths at the boundaries of textual situations, unfolding an otherness within novelistic prose which shifts interpretation and adjusts our image of contemporary conditions as represented through the novels analyzed.
29 43