Title: In the Vicinity of the Land of the Almost: The Stylistics of Jamaica Kincaid's <i>Mr. Potter</i>
Abstract:This article offers a reading of Kincaid's most stylistically convoluted novel, Mr. Potter, reconnecting its paratactic structures to the numbing emptiness of Roderick Potter's inner world. Commenting...This article offers a reading of Kincaid's most stylistically convoluted novel, Mr. Potter, reconnecting its paratactic structures to the numbing emptiness of Roderick Potter's inner world. Commenting on Kincaid's earlier novel Lucy (1990), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak identified “paratactic” and “subjunctive” modes as crucial to Kincaid's style, linking the weak connectives of paratactic grammar to the characters' affective withdrawal and alienation. An equal synergy of form and content is marked, I suggest, in the flimsy connectives that “attach” Mr. Potter to his context and reflect his own tragically indifferent attachments. But more remarkably, these same paratactic structures also open Mr. Potter into the subjunctive space of narrative redress — the posited world of rewritten histories; of textually incarnate regrets, conjectures and desires. The parataxis of Mr. Potter thus emerges not as nihilism, but as a means for constructing and sustaining alternate realities, a “land of the almost” to supplement the land of the real.Read More
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-02-19
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 5
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