Kazuo Ishiguro’s Gestural Poetics

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. "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"-- Provided by publisher "Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics explores some of the more radical thematic and formal aspects of the writing of this most distinctive of novelists. Marked by great subtlety of expression, a clarity and precision of prose that is in tension with the often profound unreliability of the speaking subject, the surface of Ishiguro's novels belie the aggressively radical content. In readings of his exploration of empathy and the ethics of reading the posthuman, post-WWII politics and anti-Americanism, the deconstruction of the possibility of 'history', and the Kafka-esque psychogeographies of his fictional spaces, Peter Sloane places Ishiguro in the context of a late modernist aesthetic, one that is informed by the intervening rise and fall of the postmodern."-- Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Table of contents 8 Acknowledgements 9 Abbreviations 10 Introduction: Where the World Worlds 12 Chapter 1 Gestures 26 Chapter 2 Imagination 58 Chapter 3 Aesthetics 86 Chapter 4 Architext 114 Chapter 5 Space 144 Conclusion: The Remains of the . . . 172 References 176 Index 188 List of Abbreviations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Gestures -- Part 1 Realism -- Part 2 Modernism -- 2. Imagination -- Part 1 Games -- Part 2 Childhood Arts -- 3. Aesthetics -- 4. Architext -- 5. Space Conclusion: The Remains of the ... -- References -- Index