Articles

‘“grammars of displacement”: Kojo Laing’s Lines of Flight’, Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 28, iss. 2 (2024), pp. 148-162.

https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2024.2343664

Departing from the relationship between the texts of the Ghanaian poet and novelist Kojo Laing and a recent international art exhibition, this article traces the relationship between style and the multivalent activity of flight across Laing’s work. Drawing upon an intercontinental range of philosophers – from Deleuze and Guattari to contemporary Akan thinkers – it analyses the intersections between gender, geography, and language in Laing’s texts, and demonstrates their value within the context of discussion of contemporary literature’s investment in possible futures. Laing’s transnational aesthetic foregrounds lines of flight across and between different linguistic and cultural communities, and traces relentlessly emerging or possible constellations of relation. Situating Laing in the context of his interdisciplinary reception, this article seeks to explore the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of the unusual networks of affiliation and response of one of West Africa’s most important, yet critically undervalued, contemporary writers.

‘“A Fantasticall Rapsody of Dialogisme”: John Eliot and the Translational Grotesque’, in Translation and Transposition in the Early Modern Period: Knowledge, Literature, Travel, ed. Karen Bennett and Rogério Miguel Puga (New York: Routledge, 2023)

https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003092452-13

This chapter examines the intersections and interrelations between translational practices and grotesque aesthetics in John Eliot’s language-learning manual, Ortho-Epia Gallica (1593). It argues both for the centrality of Eliot’s satirical celebration of hybridity and heteroglossia within a developing grotesque aesthetic in Early Modern England and also for the importance of Eliot’s presentation of language contact to contemporary theorisations of translation. Far from merely representing linguistic interaction on the printed page, it suggests that Eliot’s text undermines the notion of languages as separate and clearly demarcated linguistic communities, and reconfigures translation as a grotesque and proliferative engagement with a continuum of linguistic difference. This chapter, in seeking to establish not only the relevance of Eliot’s manual to recent discussions regarding the nature of translation but also its position within an emerging tradition of grotesque writing, seeks to demonstrate its continuing importance as a text capable of disrupting accepted critical chronologies and assumptions.

‘A poetics of parallax: The significant geographies of Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990)’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 58, iss. 4 (2022), pp. 453-467.

https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2022.2048265

Tracing the interplay between different scales of language, narrative, and geography in Omeros (1990), this article analyses the activity of parallax within Derek Walcott’s aesthetic, and its broader significance for the relationship between postcolonial literature and space. It argues Omeros evidences Walcott’s development of a poetics of parallax, and analyses this poetics in a way that builds on recent critical developments such as the focus on “significant geographies”, as well as on established critical distinctions, primarily that between style and plot. By analysing the negotiation of different scales of attention across the poem – from local depiction characterized by heightened style to the insistence on spatial and historical relationships that elude style’s descriptive powers – this article connects formal and stylistic readings with the text’s geopolitical imagination. The result provides a new angle on the poem’s negotiation of Homeric sources, and its delineation of the tensions and pressures that criss-cross postcolonial spatiality.

‘King Multitude: Browning and Coriolanus’, Essays in Criticism, vol. 72, iss. 2 (2022), pp. 148-169.

https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgac014

This article explores the imaginative impact of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus on Brownwing’s drama and poetry. To do so provides a new perspective on his work in two main ways. First, it ties several characteristic aspects of his poetry—his diction; his interest in the rhetorical self-justification of power, and in confrontations between individual and collective voices—to a single formative intertextual and personal encounter. Second, reconsidering his body of work in the terms generated by this encounter provides one means by which the relationship between aesthetics and politics across Browning’s career might be thought of in terms of a continuity, rather than—as is often asserted—a waning of political interest. Consequently, this article provides a different perspective on Browning from that implied by Trevor Lloyd’s dated yet persistent suggestion that the poet’s ‘political interests were not of primary concern in his work,’ and only ‘have some importance in considering several of his poems of the second rank.’ Instead, it begins to trace both the immediate and the lasting consequences of Browning’s imaginative entanglement with Coriolanus, from his ‘comparative encounters’ and his recurring interest in ‘multitudes’ to his fascination with the anatomy of social groups.

‘“the terror of sheer bigness”: Microplotting Immensity in Frank Norris’s The Octopus’, Style, vol. 55, no. 2 (2021), pp. 253-269.

https://doi.org/10.5325/style.55.2.0253

This article traces the stylistic consequences of the attempt to map seemingly infinitely expanding networks of trade and value in Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901). It focuses on the rehearsal at the level of the sentence of characters' grappling with the “terror of sheer bigness,” and the complex interrelation of public and private, political and personal, local and global inaugurated by the railroad's management of the distribution of wheat. The textures of Norris's style—his grammar, syntax, and diction—are implicated in the novel's interrogation and negotiation of these dislocations. From the failures of mimetic phrasing spiralling across lengthy cumulative sentences to patterns of phrasal repetition, the various microplots at work within the novel's verbal landscapes represent an essential and often overlooked facet of the force of The Octopus.

‘“the bourgeois nature in difficulties”: The Crisis of Liberalism in Robert Browning’s Aristophanes’ Apology (1875)’, Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 48, no. 3 (Autumn, 2020), pp. 551-575.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150319000172  

This article traces Browning’s often complex relationship with liberalism, taking as its principal case study the unjustly neglected long poem Aristophanes’ Apology (1875). Overhauling the conventional critical approach to this poem, this article reads its central antagonism as evidence of Browning’s poetry’s engagement with its contemporary political context, an engagement that has transformative effects on his poem’s form and style. The poem also draws translation and translationality into dialogue with a broader argument about liberalism’s unsettling contradictions, and positions a generic investment in comedy in relation to its investigation of these contradictions. Above all, this article makes the case that Browning’s politics, historically underappreciated in scholarship, are an active presence in his writing which ought to be taken seriously.

‘“great words carrying the world”: Intercultural Translation in B. Kojo Laing’s “No needle in the sky”’, Moveable Type, Issue 10, ‘Peripheries’; (Summer, 2018), pp. 50-63.

https://doi.org/10.14324/111.1755-4527.083

This article analyses the role of intercultural translation in one of the poems collected in Godhorse, ‘No needle in the sky’. It shows how Laing’s engagement with influence – particularly the poem’s use of Gerald Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ as a model – prefigures the emphasis on intercultural exchange which characterises his later works. By returning to the poetry, I draw attention to the ways in which the concerns of Laing’s later works are also the concerns of his earliest writings, and suggest ways in which recent criticism could reposition its arguments in light of this. Ultimately, it is proposed that Laing’s uses of intertextuality in Godhorse can act as a template for what Fredric Jameson has called an ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’, or a ‘pedagogical culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system’ – an aesthetic which Jameson suggests might be used as a corrective to the stagnating and isolating tendencies of much of late capitalism.