Michael Ondaatje

Spinks, Lee

doi:10.7228/manchester/9780719066320.001.0001

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Michael Ondaatje (Fig. 1) -perhaps most famous for his novel The English Patient (1992) -was born in 1943 in Kegalle, Sri Lanka (Spinks 2009). He was the middle of three children, born into a wellto-do colonial family.…”

Section: Mindreadingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ondaatje's father, Mervyn, had chronic alcohol problems and squandered much of their wealth (Spinks 2009). He developed increasingly erratic behaviour, including an episode when he commandeered a train at gunpoint, instructing the driver to shunt backwards and forwards, before stripping naked and hiding in a tunnel.…”

Section: Mindreadingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the 1970s, Ondaatje's curiosity was caught by a short article about the early jazz musician Buddy Bolden , which stated that he 'went berserk in a parade' (Spinks 2009). Ondaatje travelled extensively in Louisiana to research Bolden, visiting the East Louisiana State Hospital (Fig.…”

Section: Mindreadingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So when we read this poem at this point in the book, as well as the rhythms of being on a train, one experiences a gradual dissolution of sense as the possible connections between words are explored. As explained by Lee Spinks, lecturer in English at Edinburgh University, as the novel progresses, the relationship between words becomes increasingly distant, and in places the only connection may be the coincidence of sounds between otherwise unrelated words (Spinks 2009).…”

Section: A Personal Reading Of Coming Through Slaughtermentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bewilderment and conviction: the portrayal of madness in Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter

Polnay¹

2011

Adv. psychiatr. treat

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SummaryThe scraps of historical data that exist about Buddy Bolden – a cornet player from New Orleans who influenced early jazz – have evoked curiosity in a wide range of writers, including psychiatrists. The latter are interested because Bolden ‘went berserk in a parade’ at the age of 29 and spent the rest of his life in an asylum. This article is about the novel Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje, which is based on Bolden's life. I discuss how the form of the text – including its refusal to comment on where sense is lost – conveys to readers the bewilderment and conviction of Bolden's experience and allows them to share something of this.

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Section: Mindreadingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mindreadingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Mindreadingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Personal Reading Of Coming Through Slaughtermentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bewilderment and conviction: the portrayal of madness in Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter

Polnay¹

2011

Adv. psychiatr. treat

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“…Critics usually attribute this outcome to Buddy’s obsessive need to be spontaneous in his jazz music. He thereby realizes the “singularity” (Spinks, 2008: 62; 2009: 81) of innovative, freeing experiences sought by players of free jazz and postmodernist writers alike. The enduring focus on the modernist and postmodernist aesthetics and historiographic metafiction of Coming Through Slaughter (see, for examples, Bachner, 2005; Diebschlag, 2016; Hochbruck, 1994; Maxwell, 1985; Solecki, 1985; Verhoeven, 1994) has helped readers understand how to situate Ondaatje in the development of experimental writing in English since his first books appeared in the 1960s.…”

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confidence: 98%

Racialized rooms and technologies of stardom in Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter

Deshaye

2016

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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Drawing on recent theories of race from critical race theory, this article examines Michael Ondaatje’s 1976 novel Coming Through Slaughter to assess the involvement, or lack, of technologies of stardom such as photography and radio in the celebrity of the fictionalized jazz musician Charles “Buddy” Bolden. This essay builds on established postcolonial and aesthetic readings, and offers an alternative to the often-held view that Ondaatje is not concerned by race, or the suggestion that he is only preoccupied by art and artists. Its textual focus is an interpretation of the counterfactual (put differently, anachronistic) scene involving a radio and scenes related to the darkroom and the racial significance of its black and white negatives. It argues that these technologies “colour” the rooms in which they are found and thereby complicate ideas of domestic privacy and opposing publicity.

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Ondaatje, Michael

Bower¹

2016

The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies

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Michael Ondaatje is a poet and storyteller of extraordinary energy and beauty, and one of Canada's finest writers. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, moved to England in 1952, and has lived in Canada since 1962. Ondaatje's career reflects his remarkable ability to juggle literary, editorial, academic, and critical work. Although he is internationally renowned for his novels, particularly the Booker Prize winning novel The English Patient , Ondaatje has also authored many highly celebrated collections of poetry, as well as screenplays and nonfiction books and essays. Ondaatje's writing is fixated by history, memory, and the physicality of human lived experience, and it powerfully forces us to re‐experience the living environments in which we live.

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Michael Ondaatje

Cited by 9 publications

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Bewilderment and conviction: the portrayal of madness in Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter

Bewilderment and conviction: the portrayal of madness in Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter

Racialized rooms and technologies of stardom in Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter

Ondaatje, Michael

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