Literature's Sensuous Geographies - (Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies) by S Moslund (Paperback)

About the Book

"Literature's Sensuous Geographies offers a study of place in postcolonial literature and theory from other than the socio-cultural and political angles that have traditionally dominated the field. Moslund explores "sensuous geographies" (something that has so far been neglected in the study of place in literature) as opening up other than discursive relations to the world - other, non-territorial modes of being-in-the-world. The book develops a sense-aesthetic mode of reading (a "topo-poetics") and in close-readings of Conrad, Blixen, Coetzee and Achebe (among others), Moslund explores dimensions in literature that open up the place world as produced by desubjectified intensities of smell, sound, sight, touch, etc. Sense-aesthetic qualities of literary language are shown in this way as radically challenging the rationalizing logic of modernity (the inner logic of imperialism), at the heart of which Moslund identifies a disciplining of the senses and a reduction of the sensuous openness of reality. With his study of sensuous geographies in literature, Moslund makes a notable shift in the field of postcolonial studies and geocriticism from discourse analysis to aesthetic analysis"--

Book Synopsis

Using place studies within a postcolonial context, this study explores the sense-aesthetic dimensions in literature such as smell, sound, etc. that often challenge the rationalizing logic of modernity. Through close readings of writers such as Conrad and Coetzee, Moslund invites scholars to shift focus from discourse analysis to aesthetic analysis.

Review Quotes

"This is a fascinating extension of the postcolonial concern with place. Moslund takes the theme of the conflicted construction of place into new territory grounding the interrelation of place, body, language, and aesthetics in new readings of some of the key texts in the field." - Bill Ashcroft, Australian Professorial Fellow of the Arts and Media, the University of New South Wales, Australia

About the Author

Sten Pultz Moslund is Associate Professor in the department of Comparative Literature in the Institute for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark.