Symbolism : an international annual of critical aesthetics. Volume 16

Yearbook Essays in this special focus constellate around the diverse symbolic forms in which Caribbean consciousness has manifested itself transhistorically, shaping identities within and without structures of colonialism and postcolonialism. Offering interdisciplinary critical, analytical and theoretical approaches to the objects of study, the book explores textual, visual, material and ritual meanings encoded in Caribbean lived and aesthetic practices. Foreword from the Editors Table of Contents Special Focus: Caribbean Symbolic Forms Introduction: Caribbean Symbolic Forms An ‘Altermodern’ Reading of Ermán González’s Relicarios: The Flight of the Sign and the Artist as Semionaut Mourning’s Spiral: Trauma, Time, and Memory in Derek Walcott’s Omeros The Case of Melancholy Metaesthetics: Reading Teresa de Los Andes and Caribbean Lamentation Narratives Defying Social Death: Magic, Medicine, and Masquerade in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable Spiritual Adventure through Song African Diasporic Traditional Symbols and Claims: The Case of the Maroons Earl Lovelace and Caribbean Gender Symbolic Forms: Revisiting Masculinity and Reconstructing National Identities Familial Spaces: ‘Yard’ and ‘Matrifocal Family’ in Pre-Independence Jamaican Literature The ‘Janet House’: An Endangered Vernacular House Form in Grenada General Section Symbolic Buildings and Conceptual Blends: How The Concert for New York City and 9/11 Poetry Humanized the Twin Towers Byatt’s “Cold”: A Marriage of Fire and Ice The Dedalus Complex: A Lacanian Analysis of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Metaphor in the Text of Psychoanalysis: Lacan, Poe and the Poetic Symbol Symbolic Malfunctions and the Failure of Nerve: Heretical Anthropology Book Reviews List of Contributors Index