Michael Ondaatje: Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing

Milena Marinkova is the co-editor of Visions of Canada: Canadian Studies in Europe, and has publications in Moving Worlds and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She teaches Contemporary, Postcolonial and Canadian Literature at the University of Leeds and the University of Birmingham, UK.

• Acknowledgements; Table of contents; Introduction; The multiple senses of the haptic; A touch affectionate but troubling; Michael Ondaatje: Writing politically with a difference; Notes; Chapter I: Haptic Writing as Affective Cinema; Hapticizing the 'I' / 'eye' in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; Coming through the haptic cut: History in the making and Coming through Slaughter; Humble Affections of the Cinematic: Michael Ondaatje's Films of the 1970s; Notes; Chapter II: Micropolitical Hapticity and Witness Writing; 'Touching into words' the intimacy of witness writing in Running in the Family; Witnessing the body/The body witnessing in Anil's Ghost; Notes; Chapter III: Haptic Writing and Micropolitical Betrayals; 'A falling together of accomplices' in In the Skin of a Lion: Writing, history, betrayal; Between the grope of the hand and the sight of a rifle: The betrayal of propinquity in The English Patient Betrayals of the Cinematic: Anthony Minghella's The English Patient; Notes; Epilogue: The Haptic in Literature: Hiding, Playing, Educating; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

"Theoretically sophisticated and critically sensitive, this book provides a much-needed response to criticism of Ondaatje that has reductively simplified discussions of aesthetics and politics by placing them at odds with each other. Marinkova charts a way out of this false opposition by reading Ondaatje's work as haptic writing that engages the senses in situated, contextualized ways. Through the lens of the micropolitical, Marinkova demonstrates the ethics of Ondaatje's writing through its aesthetics, and argues powerfully and persuasively for its challenge to dominant politics and reading practices. This extraordinary book is the study that Ondaatje's complex writing has been waiting for, the study that it deserves."- Dr Gillian Roberts, Lecturer in North American Cultural Studies, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, UK.