Overview

Through readings of Ishiguro’s repurposing of key elements of realism and modernism; his interest in childhood imagination and sketching; interrogation of aesthetics and ethics; his fascination with architecture and the absent home; and his expressionist use of ‘imaginary’ space and place, Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics examines the manner in which Ishiguro's fictions approach, but never quite reveal, the ineffable, inexpressible essence of his narrators’ emotionally fraught worlds. Reformulating Martin Heidegger’s suggestion that the ‘essence of world can only be indicated’ as ‘the essence of world can only be gestured towards,’ Sloane argues that while Ishiguro’s novels and short stories are profoundly sensitive to the limitations of literary form, their narrators are, to varying degrees, equally keenly attuned to the failures of language itself. In order to communicate something of the emotional worlds of characters adrift in various uncertainties, while also commenting on the expressive possibilities of fiction and the mimetic arts more widely, Ishiguro appropriates a range of metaphors which enable both author and character to gesture towards the undisclosable essences of fiction and being.

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9781501347993

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Reviews

Peter Sloane's significant and perceptive book argues that Ishiguro's novels gesture towards rather than express their meanings. Following this powerful insight, he weaves together the most acute and precise critical readings with related philosophical and theoretical ideas to produce an illuminating reading of all Ishiguro's work to date: a major work of scholarship on one of the world's leading writers. * Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway University of London, UK * Peter Sloane's study of Sir Kazuo Ishiguro's writings is meticulous and insightful. He has redrawn the limits of literary criticism and of philosophical and aesthetic elements in Ishiguro's fiction. His eloquent chapters bring the unknowable to light, the ineffable to our senses, and will prove to be an important contribution to Ishiguro studies. * Cynthia F. Wong, Professor of English, University of Colorado Denver, USA *

Peter Sloane's significant and perceptive book argues that Ishiguro's novels gesture towards rather than express their meanings. Following this powerful insight, he weaves together the most acute and precise critical readings with related philosophical and theoretical ideas to produce an illuminating reading of all Ishiguro's work to date: a major work of scholarship on one of the world's leading writers. * Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway University of London, UK *

Author Information

Peter Sloane is a Lecturer in Contemporary Anglophone Literature at the University of Lincoln, UK. He is the author of David Foster Wallace and the Body (2019), and is currently working on his next book project, a study of Altruism and the Arts 1900-Present.

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