Michael Ondaatje Haptic Aesthetics and Micropolitical Writing [Paperback]

This study of selected literary and cinematic works by Michael Ondaatje investigates the political potential of the Canadian author's aesthetics. Contributing to current debates about affect and representation, ideology critique and the artwork, trauma and testimony, this book uses the concept of the haptic to demonstrate how Ondaatje's multisensory, fluid and historically inflected writing can forge an enabling relationship between audience, author and text. This is where Ondaatje's micropolitics, often misconstrued as ideologically suspect aestheticism, emerges: a praxis that intimates how one can write and read politically with a difference.

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

Demonstrates how Ondaatje's multisensory, fluid and historically inflected writing can forge an intimately embodied, ethically responsible and politically enablingló–