Estrangement, empathic failure, and the provocation of a critical cosmopolitan vision in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood

Bibliographic Data

ID9003641
AuthorsAlan McCluskey (University of Nottingham Ningbo China, corresponding author), Alan Liam McCluskey (University of Nottingham Ningbo China)
Year2014
Volume49
Issue2
Pages215-228
Publication date2014-04-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0021989414529576
OpenAlexW2089886922
LanguageEN
References cited16

The Nature of Blood (1997) is perhaps the most formally experimental novel Caryl Phillips has yet produced, and features an innovative combination of literary devices such as polyphony, defamiliarization, and intertextuality. In this essay, I will argue that an overlooked effect of these techniques is the provocation of a self-reflexive, historically conscious and critical view of human subjectivity that chimes with what Rebecca Walkowitz (2006: 2) calls a “critical cosmopolitan vision”. This is a way of seeing that is suspicious of the prevailing modes of interpretation and understanding that attend a given historical context, and which attempts to look beyond fixed notions of identity and belonging

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Defamiliarization · Epistemology · Identity (music · Interpretation (philosophy · Intertextuality · Linguistics · Literature · Polyphony · Provocation test · Psychoanalysis · Reflexivity · Sociology · Subjectivity · Anthropology · History · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · South Asian Studies and Diaspora