Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje (Studies in Comparative Literature and Intellectual History)

This book demonstrates how world fiction by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje counters biopolitics with aesthetic and political—biopoetic—strategies producing transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility. It defines and explores heterotopic processes fostering a slant perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war. After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, this book focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje. Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for becoming other. Higgins and Leps define and explore a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war. "After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, this book focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counter-development of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Woolf, Foucault, and Ondaatje. Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for becoming other. Our work defines and explores a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war"-- Provided by publisher Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations List of Figures Introduction: Heterotopic World Fiction Part I: Biopolitics: Technologies of the Individual Part II: Biopoetics: Technologies of the Worldly Self Figures Selected Bibliography Index