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A poetics of place in the world-system: west coast modernism and the integration of Vancouver into the global economy

A poetics of place in the world-system: west coast modernism and the integration of Vancouver into the global economy
A poetics of place in the world-system: west coast modernism and the integration of Vancouver into the global economy
Considerations of place and the local can help to shed light on the specific ways in which literature and culture have mediated the global process of accumulation and dispossession associated with the capitalist world-system. If social geography and world-systems analysis can help to map and historicize space and place in terms of a global history of capitalist expansion, literature can also help to make sense of how the unequal and uneven development of capitalist modernity is experienced, understood, and contested in specific locations. By situating the West Coast avant-garde poetics associated with the literary magazine Tish and the Kootenay School of Writing in relation to Vancouver’s place in the changing global economic system, this essay considers how the local provides a provisional site for an anti-imperialist poetics that defamiliarizes global processes of capital accumulation and its economies of dispossession and exclusion. In so doing, it suggests that contemporary West Coast experimental writing can be read as a form of peripheral modernism that interrupts the uneven and unequal logic of capitalist modernity and invites readers to reflect on the historical forms of dispossession and exploitation associated with globalization.
1920-1222
127-161
Morton, Stephen
3200c49e-fcfa-4088-9168-1d6998266ec1
Morton, Stephen
3200c49e-fcfa-4088-9168-1d6998266ec1

Morton, Stephen (2016) A poetics of place in the world-system: west coast modernism and the integration of Vancouver into the global economy. ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 47 (1-2 Jan-Apr), 127-161. (doi:10.1353/ari.2016.0011).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Considerations of place and the local can help to shed light on the specific ways in which literature and culture have mediated the global process of accumulation and dispossession associated with the capitalist world-system. If social geography and world-systems analysis can help to map and historicize space and place in terms of a global history of capitalist expansion, literature can also help to make sense of how the unequal and uneven development of capitalist modernity is experienced, understood, and contested in specific locations. By situating the West Coast avant-garde poetics associated with the literary magazine Tish and the Kootenay School of Writing in relation to Vancouver’s place in the changing global economic system, this essay considers how the local provides a provisional site for an anti-imperialist poetics that defamiliarizes global processes of capital accumulation and its economies of dispossession and exclusion. In so doing, it suggests that contemporary West Coast experimental writing can be read as a form of peripheral modernism that interrupts the uneven and unequal logic of capitalist modernity and invites readers to reflect on the historical forms of dispossession and exploitation associated with globalization.

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Accepted/In Press date: 12 September 2015
e-pub ahead of print date: 5 July 2016
Published date: 2016
Organisations: English

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 400085
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/400085
ISSN: 1920-1222
PURE UUID: 078e6022-bcf0-443a-b7ac-b32736e2d749

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Date deposited: 15 Sep 2016 08:08
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 02:09

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