Speculative Anthropology: A Literary History of Contamination - Couverture rigide

Hemer, Oscar

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1912385627 ISBN 13 : 9781912385621

Editeur : Sean Kingston Publishing, 2025

Synopsis

Anthropology's keen interest in fiction can be traced to the discipline's so-called 'literary turn' in the 1980s and 90s, instigated by James Clifford and George Marcus' groundbreaking anthology Writing Culture (1986). But the

close connection between anthropology and literature goes back to pioneer anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who were also prominent writers. The discussion continues, and 'literary anthropology' is now a well-established sub-field that addresses literary studies as well as creative writing. Yet, anthropology's courting of literature has largely remained unanswered. Some famous authors have a background in anthropology, such as Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin and Amitav Ghosh, but few - one of the exceptions being Ghosh - have reflected on the relationship between the two practices, let alone consciously attempted to fuse them.

Speculative Anthropology: A Literary History of Contamination explores the 'intersection' between anthropology and literature from the literary side, with the perspective of the writer, rather than the critic. The title is inspired

by Argentinian author Juan José Saer's tentative definition of 'fiction' as 'speculative anthropology' and Ghanaian British philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's similarly tentative proposal for a literary tradition of 'contamination',

going back to Roman playwright Terence's fusion of comedy and tragedy. In this pioneer monograph, Oscar Hemer reinterprets Appiah's 'contamination' as genre crossing and mixing, not between different literary genres but between fiction and discursive forms of writing - anthropological as well as philosophical and historical. His tentative 'canon of contamination' explored in this volume includes, among others, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, the 'self-ethnographies' of Michel Leiris and Édouard Glissant, Jorge Luis Borges's 'fictional essays', César Aira's 'freaked-out ethnography', Chris Kraus's 'theoretical fiction', Zoë Wicomb's spectral South African history - and the exemplary philosophy-by-fiction of J.M. Coetzee.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Oscar Hemer is Professor Emeritus of Journalistic and Literary Creation at Malmö University, Sweden. His diverse body of work includes novels, translations, academic essays and experimental literary anthropology.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Sean Kingston Publishing
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1912385627
• ISBN 13: 9781912385621
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 302
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne