Beyond Words: The Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature
Author: Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin
Date Of Publication: Dec 2007
Isbn13: 9781847183705
Isbn: 1-84718-370-0
This is a book about reading, or rather about the moment when the usual frames of interpretation no longer apply. That is where the Othering Excursion begins. Through disruptive forms of rhetoric, writers discard the structures and norms of the cultural system and use the disorders thus created to suggest what lies beyond it. Cultivating distortion, conceptual blocks and chaotic constructions, their texts flout normal processes of interpretation. Whereas traditional approaches often overlook these disorders or treat them as a form of informational noise, in this study they become the basis of critical reflection. Harding and Martin elaborate a critical concept and a range of reading methods to deal with what seem to be zones of obscurity in literary texts. Cutting across boundaries of race, ethnicity and gender, they treat a wide range of poetry and short fiction that challenges traditional interpretations. Giving new readings of canonical texts, the book examines works by American authors that are widely read and taught, like Elizabeth Bishop, A.R. Ammons, Don DeLillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, or Sandra Cisneros. At the same time, it includes studies of emerging writers like Kate Braverman, Dan Chaon, or Chase Twichell.

"There is something deeply moving in witnessing the birth of a new concept. And indeed Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin’s concept of “Othering” is a welcome addition to an already crowded field, where concepts like “difference”, “alterity” or “hybridity” are firmly established. But the new concept is more than an addition, it is more in the nature of a substitution, as it aims to replace the now exhausted concepts, allows the authors to avoid the trivialities of a criticism based on gender and race, and, by focusing on form and language (or style), to recapture the now largely lost intuitions of close reading. This combination of close reading and a firm grasp of theory is one of the attractions of the book. I am impressed by their mastery of the intricacies of theory and the range of their literary corpus (in terms both of genres and texts). I have no doubt that their book will be a major contribution to the renewal of the study of contemporary American literature."

—Professor Jean-Jacques Lecercle, University of Nanterre, Paris

In Beyond Words, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin offer “a new attitude to reading” that approaches true diversity by ignoring trends toward traditional groupings of authors by race and gender and instead examining, democratically, recent American literature in terms of its unique and peculiar achievements. In choosing texts that employ “the rhetoric of the inexpressible,” the authors have identified “Othering” as the common thread running through short fiction and poetry by authors as varied as Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, Sandra Cisneros, Adrienne Rich, and Li-Young Lee. In transliterating the language of the ineffable and unspoken, Beyond Words employs its superbly original methodology toward unfolding previously inaccessible layers of meaning and provoking a fuller understanding of the creative process and its cultural milieu.

—Michael Waters, Professor of English at Salisbury University, USA

"A germinal study from an "other" (in this case, European) perspective of an at once idiosyncratic and indicative range of American texts with a view of how they, themselves, encounter the unexamined and unexpected."

—Marilyn Hacker, Professor at City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center

"Invigorating and original, Beyond Words: The Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature challenges conventional ways of approaching literary texts. Eschewing binaries, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin propose a new approach to reading and analyzing the heterogeneity of recent American literature. By juxtaposing both well-known and less-familiar poetry and short fiction by authors as various as Gayl Jones, John Ashbery, Russell Banks, and Marilyn Nelson, Harding and Martin consider a stimulating variety of texts that cross aesthetic, generic, canonical and political boundaries. Harding and Martin’s polysemous approach to literary texts, a procedure they call “othering,” is groundbreaking and enlightening. Beyond Words provides rich insights for scholars and general readers alike. Harding and Martin’s new mapping of American literature is a remarkable achievement, certain to provoke dialogue for decades to come."

—Sue Standing, Jane Ruby Professor of English, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts

"In this new book with the apt title Beyond Words: the Othering Excursion in Contemporary American Literature, Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin promise to generate intense conversation about their conceptual approach to reading canonical, as well as newer texts in late twentieth century American literature. Beyond Words favors a shift in thinking about all texts that defy conventional analysis, and it resists the cleavages that it finds in unsatisfactory terms like “alterity” and “hybridity” conceived to account for differences in gender-racial, ethnic, and class contexts. Re-conceiving Othering as a corroborative and complementary methodology rather than a splintered one, Beyond Words invites an illuminating, comprehensive analysis of literary production in late twentieth century American texts."

—Helena Woodard, Associate Professor of English, Department of English, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Wendy Harding is currently Professor of English at the University of Toulouse, France, where she is co-director of the North American Research Group (G.E.N.A.). She has published extensively on Medieval English literature and contemporary American literature.

Jacky Martin is Emeritus Professor at the University of Montpellier, France. He has published numerous articles on contemporary literature, as well as discourse and translation theory. Together Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin have collaborated on a number of scholarly publications, including A World of Difference: An Inter-Cultural Study of Toni Morrison’s Novels (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). They are also the co-editors of Constructions of Memory in Contemporary American Literature, a special issue of Profils Américains, published in 2001.

"Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin offer [this work] as a breath of fresh air not only for the study of American poetry and prose of the last thirty years, but as an attempt to revitalize literary criticism generally...It is a difficult task that could easily descend into a repetition of broad poststructuralist premises or overly generalized arguments, but Harding and Martin take such care with the project's organization and the reiteration and refining of their claim that the result is a valuable contribution on several levels...The strength of 'Beyond Words' is that it does not seek to offer a strict critical framework to be further applied to the authors and other works. The limitations of that kind of methodology are precisely what the critics argue against. Instead, they advocate an openness of reading, a way of making ourselves more and variously available to all the text has to offer."

Stacey Peebles, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Price Uk Gbp: 34.99
Price Us Usd: 52.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)