John Thieme
John Thieme is a Senior Fellow at the University of East Anglia (UK). He previously held various appointments at UEA and Chairs at the University of Hull and London South Bank University and has also taught at the Universities of Guyana and North London and, as an annual Visiting Professor, at the University of Turin. He has held honorary positions at the University of Hong Kong, the Open University (UK) and the University of Warwick. His books include Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place ,The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures, Post-Colonial Studies: The Essential Glossary and studies of Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan. A broad selection of his articles and essays is available on his academia.edu page. He was Editor of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature from 1992 to 2011 and General Editor of the Manchester University Press Contemporary World Writers Series from 1995 to 2020. His creative writing has been published in Argentina, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Malaysia, Moldova, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA. His stories ‘The Word’, ‘Himmelstein’ and ‘Esmeralda’, and his poems ‘Chinese Checkers’, ‘The Slaughter’ ‘I Watch Her Write’, 'Saraswati' and ‘Tea-Time’ are among his creative work that is available online. He is the author of two novels, The Book of Francis Barber (2018) and Cabinets of Curiosities (2023) and his first collection of verse, Paco’s Atlas and Other Poems was published by Setu (Pittsburgh) in 2018. His most recent critical book, Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change is scheduled for publication by Bloomsbury in late 2023.
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Books by John Thieme
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350296060&st=Thieme&fbclid=IwAR1vWSFMv3wlBEnIG6yp15M39gWsPLIpXpGGokvtyoFno0_vyy7F9moRtiM
Personal and public, serious and playful, John Thieme’s second volume of collected poems, Digitalis, takes a speculative look at many of the most urgent issues facing the world today. Its first part employs an eclectic array of forms to illuminate a broad range of pressing topics in poems that are linked by their concern with the contemporary predicament and the part poetry can play in making sense of it. Prominent among its themes are anthropogenic climate change and a sense of life lived in a perennial state of suspense. Its second part, ‘Massiah’, is a sequence of verse tales, told in a Guyanese barber’s shop, which move between comedy, pathos and a sense of existential threat. These poems are built around the belief that storytelling forges a sustaining notion of community and the listeners in the barber’s play a vital role in the completion of the storytelling moment, as they question, probe and react to the tales being told. The tales move between an account of Columbus’s visit to Guyana, on a fifth voyage to the Americas, which, if the received historical record is to be believed, he never made, and scurrilous accounts of more recent events, in which gossip and hearsay crystallize into urban myths. In both parts memory and invention jostle for primacy, as do pessimism and hope. Throughout the collection, the originality of John Thieme’s verse destabilizes expectations, encouraging us to question conventional perceptions about climate, history, language and more or less everything else that we take for granted.
The poems 'Digitalis' and 'A Barber's Tale, which open the two Parts of the collection have been uploaded here.
Four specimen entries now added: On George Lamming; Manichean Allegory, the Morant Bay Rebellion and Partition.
Papers by John Thieme
https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350296060&st=Thieme&fbclid=IwAR1vWSFMv3wlBEnIG6yp15M39gWsPLIpXpGGokvtyoFno0_vyy7F9moRtiM
Personal and public, serious and playful, John Thieme’s second volume of collected poems, Digitalis, takes a speculative look at many of the most urgent issues facing the world today. Its first part employs an eclectic array of forms to illuminate a broad range of pressing topics in poems that are linked by their concern with the contemporary predicament and the part poetry can play in making sense of it. Prominent among its themes are anthropogenic climate change and a sense of life lived in a perennial state of suspense. Its second part, ‘Massiah’, is a sequence of verse tales, told in a Guyanese barber’s shop, which move between comedy, pathos and a sense of existential threat. These poems are built around the belief that storytelling forges a sustaining notion of community and the listeners in the barber’s play a vital role in the completion of the storytelling moment, as they question, probe and react to the tales being told. The tales move between an account of Columbus’s visit to Guyana, on a fifth voyage to the Americas, which, if the received historical record is to be believed, he never made, and scurrilous accounts of more recent events, in which gossip and hearsay crystallize into urban myths. In both parts memory and invention jostle for primacy, as do pessimism and hope. Throughout the collection, the originality of John Thieme’s verse destabilizes expectations, encouraging us to question conventional perceptions about climate, history, language and more or less everything else that we take for granted.
The poems 'Digitalis' and 'A Barber's Tale, which open the two Parts of the collection have been uploaded here.
Four specimen entries now added: On George Lamming; Manichean Allegory, the Morant Bay Rebellion and Partition.
Abstract
This article considers the problematics of writing region with a particular focus on the formal strategies employed to represent Prairie space in four novels by the Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch. It locates Kroetsch’s work in relation to the fiction of his Western Canadian predecessors, Sinclair Ross and W.O. Mitchell, arguing that while they, too, are concerned with depicting the specifics of the Prairie environment, their approach is shackled by an adherence to the conventions of classic realism. It suggests that such conventions are best an inadequate vehicle for rendering the full gamut of Prairie experience and at worst an artificial set of rules, based on discourses of enclosure better suited to the more bounded worlds of European social situations. In contrast, Kroetsch’s work turns to whimsy, fantasy, ellipsis, discontinuity and incompletion in an endeavour to develop a poetics that will do justice to the complexities of the human relationship with Prairie “distance”. The article also considers the extent to which Kroetsch’s fiction replaces older Prairie gender codes with a new androgynous social model. It concludes by suggesting that his development of a range of non-realistic techniques to give voice to marginalized peoples and places offers a possible blueprint for writers around the globe who face the challenge of how to articulate the experience of unrepresented or under-represented regions.
Keywords
Regional writing, Prairie fiction, Spatial poetics, Robert Kroetsch, The Studhorse Man, Gone Indian, Badlands, What the Crow Said
Abstract
A comment by Narayan on the “false geography” of his “imaginary town” provides the departure-point for a discussion of Malgudi, which argues against the frequently held view that it is a metonym for a quintessential India, or South India. Taking its cue from the cultural geographer Doreen Massey’s assertion that “The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple”, the paper contends that Malgudi is a multi-faceted and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of “authentic” Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquity and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. It argues that Malgudi is far more than a physical locus, viewing it as an episteme that incorporates numerous ways of perceiving India – social, spiritual, mythological and psychological among them. Focusing on Narayan’s representation of heterotopias, it considers the demarcations between “pure” and “polluted” space in The English Teacher, the simultaneity of different layers of Indian culture in The Financial Expert and the contrast between Malgudi and a larger Indian world in The Painter of Signs.
Drawing on recent work on place and space in the field of cultural geography, this paper considers ways in which The Hungry Tide debates ecological issues and projects a human geography that attempts to mediate between cosmopolitan and subaltern voices. The paper suggests that Piya’s situation, as an American of Bengali descent who is returning to her ancestral homeland on a professional mission, refracts back on the novel’s own positioning in relation to its localized South Asian setting.
The online text of this article can be accessed through the Muse India site (www.museindia.com) and typing my surname in the Author’s Index section. It is not readily accessible by going straight to issue 24 of the journal.
As the title suggests, this is a personal response to Derek Walcott's poetry and drama. I discuss my response over the years, from the time when I found affinities between Walcott's championing of the St Lucian local and my own experience in Guyana. I conclude that Walcott "is both the most local and the most cosmopolitan of contemporary poets".
This essay endeavours to address a range of issues surrounding the varied contemporary uses of the term “cosmopolitanism” in literary and cultural contexts, viewing these against its usage in earlier eras. It engages with a number of questions. What exactly constitutes “cosmopolitanism” today? Should we regard it as a term that describes a particular cast of mind, a geopolitical situation or an ethical obligation? How does it relate to globalization (another chameleon term) and other economies and discursive systems that have crossed national boundaries, such as colonialism and postcolonialism? Is it reasonable to speak of cosmopolitanism in the singular or should we be talking about cosmopolitanisms plural? And do contemporary uses of the term have much in common with earlier understandings of what might constitute “cosmopolitanism”? The essay particularly concerns itself with the Western reception of postcolonial literary cosmopolitanisms and discusses work by Aravind Adiga, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott and Michael Ondaatje.