Book Description
Writing in the Margins sparkles with fresh insights into a group of writers for whom life and art were intricately interwoven. Marilyn Papayanis investigates the "ex-centric" expatriatea metropolitan figure whose search for the good life leads him away from the industrial West to marginalized or colonized domains. For the principal subjects of her studyD. H. Lawrence, Paul Bowles, and Lawrence Durrellexpatriation was a defining act, shaping not only their personal histories but their work as well. Whether exploring the expatriate's experience of Italy through LawrencesAarons Rod and The Lost Girl, Bowless representation of the relationshipbetween self and Other in The Sheltering Sky and The Spiders House, or Durrells ambivalent rendering of art and politics in The Alexandria Quartet, Papayanis shows that these writers concerns were not only aesthetic but ethical, that facing the question "How should I live?" led invariably to a rejection of life in modern industrial society. Papayanis acknowledges that postcolonial theory has tended to discredit the endeavors of such metropolitan expatriates, but she argues that the desire to "decenter" oneself, as these writers sought to do, is not necessarily a dishonorable one and that certain expatriate narratives actually interrogate the mythologies and modes of thought that inspire them. In her closing chapter, the author considers two more recent novels -- Don DeLillos The Names and Michael Ondaatjes The English Patient -- as postmodern revisions of the concerns and ethical preoccupations of the earlier expatriate texts. She contends that while the older, modernist expatriates pursue a doomed quest for personal redemption, languishing or dying on the periphery, the postmodern expatriates are driven home once their unwitting complicity in the projects of imperialism and genocide is revealed.
About the Author
A former attorney, Marilyn Adler Papayanis received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University and teaches English at Montclair State University. She was named the winner of the 2001 Durrell Prize for New Scholarship.
Writing in the Margins: The Ethics of Expatriation from Lawrence to Ondaatje SYNOPSIS
Writing in the Margins sparkles with fresh insights into a group of writers for whom life and art were intricately interwoven. Marilyn Papayanis investigates the "ex-centric" expatriate--a metropolitan figure whose search for the good life leads him away from the industrial West to marginalized or colonized domains. This book offers a wonderful mix of genres that usually don't go together--expatriate fiction and travel writing, as well as biography.