Nature-Function in Caryl Phillips’s "Cambridge"

• Carine Mardorossian ^[1]
  1. [1] University at Buffalo, State University of New York

     University at Buffalo, State University of New York

     City of Buffalo, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, ISSN 0004-1327, ISSN-e 1920-1222, Vol. 48, Nº. 3-4, 2017 (Ejemplar dedicado a: special issue on Caryl Phillips), págs. 187-207
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The author's ecocritical reading of Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge (1991) reveals the extent to which nonhuman landscapes in Caribbean fiction harbor a multiplicity of meanings. These meanings work in tandem with other sites of difference such as race and gender to produce the category “human” in a way that has gone unaddressed in the current ecocritical consensus surrounding the untenability of the human/nonhuman dyad. Instead of discussing the environment as a backdrop to human affairs and relations that it may or may not be seen as influencing, the environment in Caryl Phillips’s work operates, the author argues, as a form of “landscape-function” that echoes Foucault’s analysis of authorship. This “landscape-function” challenges approaches that foreground the environment as a pre-existing space that evolves outside of the subject and instead sees it as function of discourse, i.e. as instrumental to the construction of the humanist subject.