Kenneth White’s Essays: Cartography Grounded in Self
This article considers the idea of the essay as cartography in the context of one of Kenneth White’s collections of essays: The Wanderer and his Charts: Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty. Essays on Cultural Renewal (2004). Although the cartography drawn up by these essays m...
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| Argitaratua izan da: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises, |
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| Egile nagusia: | |
| Formatua: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Hizkuntza: | Anglais |
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Études écossaises
2011
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| Gaiak: | |
| Sarrera elektronikoa: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Gaia: | This article considers the idea of the essay as cartography in the context of one of Kenneth White’s collections of essays: The Wanderer and his Charts: Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty. Essays on Cultural Renewal (2004). Although the cartography drawn up by these essays maps out a rich, textured, criss-crossing of influences, interests and perspectives, all tracks ineluctably lead back to the writer himself. The cartography is created by a dense, co-ordinated system of reference to authors and works that have influenced White’s conception of geopoetics. White is painstaking in his delineation of the genesis and terrain of his own mindscape, cataloguing the writers, the books, the places, the landscapes, the atmospheres and the encounters that have been important in shaping him and his work. This mapping is scattered with autobiographical detail and frequent self-reference which might be considered narcissistic but is above all a reflection of the author’s belief that his own adherence to the literary high line has been exemplary. |
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