Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies)

'œFor 30 years V.S. Naipaul and Wilson Harris have been regarded as the most interesting West Indian novelists: Naipaul for his objective realism, Harris for his oft-stated opposition to 'authoritarian realism' and 'imaginative illiteracy.' Drake believes that the 'potent forces of unconscious memory and desire' are crucial in Harris's fiction, and she explores this thesis in chapters devoted to four of the novelist's 20 books.... She forcefully demonstrates the importance in Harris's fiction of 'unconscious psychic dimensions, nonlinear narrative structure, the awareness of a rupture in the correlation between language and accepted reality, and a sense of cultural crisis.'... The theoretical bases and the ramifications are here pursued relentlessly and exhaustively, ultimately leading to the conclusion that 'Harris's fiction is thought attempting to express linguistically' the set of relations between body-matter and the universe, that it always explores 'parallel possibility' (or 'doubling'). Drake makes substantial use of Derrida, Marx, and Lacan in her analysis. For graduate libraries.'' ChoiceSandra E Drake is the author of 'Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies)', published 1986 under ISBN 9780313247835 and ISBN 0313247838.