Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing

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"Theoretically sophisticated and critically sensitive, this book provides a much-needed response to criticism of Ondaatje that has reductively simplified discussions of aesthetics and politics by placing them at odds with each other. Marinkova charts a way out of this false opposition by reading Ondaatje's work as haptic writing that engages the senses in situated, contextualized ways. Through the lens of the micropolitical, Marinkova demonstrates the ethics of Ondaatje's writing through its aesthetics, and argues powerfully and persuasively for its challenge to dominant politics and reading practices. This extraordinary book is the study that Ondaatje's complex writing has been waiting for, the study that it deserves."- Dr Gillian Roberts, Lecturer in North American Cultural Studies, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, UK.
"This masterful new study of Michael Ondaatje's oeuvre examines all his works, including his cinematic experiments, in the light of theories of hapticity, affect, rhizomatic aesthetics, and Marxist politics. The result is an impassioned exploration of the relationship between the sensual, the cognitive and what we may call the multiply aware text. Marinkova's authoritative and riveting book skilfully mobilises an array of often difficult theoretical approaches to elucidate one of our most important and most recognisable contemporary authors. Essential reading for Ondaatje specialists, but also all those interested in new approaches to dialogues between politics, aesthetics, historiography and fiction." - Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Professor of the Humanities, School of English, University of Leeds, UK.

Author Bio

Milena Marinkova is the co-editor of Visions of Canada: Canadian Studies in Europe, and has publications in Moving Worlds and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She teaches Contemporary, Postcolonial and Canadian Literature at the University of Birmingham and the University of Leeds, UK.