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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.
Lesley Higgins, Professor of English at York University, specializes in late Victorian and modernist studies. Author of The Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics, she has also edited three volumes of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s prose. Research interests include world literature, feminist studies of modernism, textual studies, and poetry.
Marie-Christine Leps, Associate Professor of English at York University, is founding coordinator of the Graduate Diploma in World Literature. Author of Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance, she specializes in literary and cultural theory, world literature, and discourse analysis. Her current project focuses on world fictions of friendship.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
List of Figures
Introduction: Heterotopic World Fiction
Part One. Biopolitics: Technologies of the Individual
Correlating Knowledge and Power Relations: The Birth of Biopolitics
Discipline and Punish: Discerning the Dangerous
Mrs. Dalloway: A Dangerous Day
In the Skin of a Lion: Dangerous Yearnings
Part Two. Biopoetics: Technologies of the Worldly Self
From Biopolitics to Biopoetics
Concepts
Parrhēsia: Dangerous Truth Telling
Bios/Logos: Living Truth
Askēsis: The Art of Elaborating the Self as a Practice of Freedom
Experience-Books: Altering Truths
Heterotopic Methods
Method 1—Disposing/Transposing the Archive: Criminal Vanishing Acts
Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur, et mon frère . . .
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems
Flush: A Biography
Method 2—Distracting/Transacting Genealogy: Reading for One’s Life
Between the Acts
The English Patient
The History of Sexuality, vol. 1
Method 3—Dislocating/Transiting Strategics: Reading Biopoetic Assemblages
Foucault 1: The History of Sexuality, vols. 2, 3, 4
Foucault 2: Answering Questions
Woolf 1: “. . . very little persuaded of the truth of anything”
Woolf 2: Orlando
Woolf 3: The Waves
Ondaatje 1:“[W]e can’t rely on only one voice”
Ondaatje 2: Warlight
Ondaatje 3: Running in the Family
Ondaatje 4: The Cat’s Table
Figures
Selected Bibliography
Index