Island metapoetics and beyond: introducing island poetics, Part II

Abstract

This is the second part of a two-part paper co-authored by the members of the Island Poetics Research Group, which introduces a larger project on the poetic construction of islands in island fictions across media, genres, and geographical regions. Traditional island scholarship tends to discuss islands as tropes for a set of often preconceived and fixed meanings (such as isolation, imprisonment, paradise, remoteness, etc.) and thus often bypasses the complex poetic processes through which islands come to be in literary texts. Our intervention in the debate seeks to offer a precise analysis of the practices and operations through which islands are conceived and reconceived. The two parts of this paper examine different modes of island (re)conception in 20th-and 21st-century island fiction. They discuss fictional islands as particularly mobile spatial figures that raise the question of what an island is, refusing to offer easy answers and allowing for a reconsideration of the role of islands in contemporary discourse. Against potentially essentialist accounts of what islands 'are' and 'mean', our close readings of key moments within island narratives engage with the processes through which island spaces are constructed in different media. Part II engages more deeply with the textures of the media themselves in order to analyze the ways in which island metapoetics implicitly or explicitly exposes the processes of island construction. The article ends with a discussion of how island narratives can draw attention to and resist their own conceptions of islandness and thus interrogate the very object of island studies.

On sensing island spaces and the spatial practice of island-making: introducing island poetics, Part I

“…While Hay was talking about real islands, we would like to propose a similar shift of attention in relation to fictional islands. In the second part, we will engage more deeply with the mediality itself in order to analyse the ways in which islands are imagined and presented across different media, and with the manner in which island narratives can draw attention to and resist their own conceptions of islandness (Graziadei et al, 2017). The overall aim of this two-part article, then, is to probe the multiple ways in which islands are constructed through, by, and in fiction; in this sense, advocating a poetic approach to island studies means calling for a nuanced understanding of the particularities of islands as they are experienced by characters, readers, and viewers.…”

Island fictions and metaphors in contemporary literature

“…It seems that women tend to appear as the, often mythical, enticing or longed-for, inhabitants of islands, starting with Circe and Calypso, for example, but rarely, just as in other traditions of travel literature, as their explorers, not even in the alternative island narratives considered here, such as the novel The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares (Graziadei et al, 2017b) with the female character Faustine as part of an artificially recreated projection of a past island life, or the computer game Dear Esther (Graziadei et al, 2017a), where the woman named Esther is an absent memory on the island, its explorer a male character. While the conception of islands is shown to be highly varied and multi-layered in contemporary literature and other media, one could ask whether the gender pattern of island narratives does not remain far more limited and clichéd.…”

“…The two articles by the members of the Island Poetics Research Group, Daniel Graziadei, Britta Hartmann, Ian Kinane, Johannes Riquet and Barney Samson (2017aSamson ( , 2017b, depart from a view of islands as representational or symbolic spaces, be they the traditionally self-enclosed insular spaces or the more open and hybrid spaces of counter-narratives, towards a focus on the fictional, poetic creation of islands. Thereby, they emphasise how island spaces emerge in texts through the depiction of various perspectives on them, of which the, often predominant, description of visual perceptions is only one.…”

“…The article shows this, for instance, with regard to Derek Walcott's Pantomime, where the creation of an island is literally staged and a reversal of dominant Western island discourses enacted when the characters play a black Robinson Crusoe and a white Friday, thus inverting hierarchies of power as well as prevailing images of the exotic linked to tropical islands. Such a deconstruction of existing island narratives and predominant, even essentialist, interpretations of islands is at the core of the second paper on island poetics (Graziadei et al, 2017b), which explores meta-fictional reflections on island conception, the intermedial unsettling as well as the ultimate refusal of any stable island creation in various texts and films. Highly self-reflexive literary texts, such as Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before (1995) and Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel (1940), are analysed alongside the television series Lost (2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010), for instance, showing how in these different medial constructions of islands, preconceived notions of islandness are destabilised and the multi-layered, intertextual and intermedial, dynamic poetics of island conception becomes apparent.…”

Rethinking utopian and dystopian imagination in island literature and culture

“…There has already been much valuable theorization on island literature both in the form of articles (e.g. Graziadei et al, 2017aGraziadei et al, , 2017bFletcher, 2011a) and monographs (e.g. Riquet, 2019;Kinane, 2016).…”