Not Needing all the Words

Michael Ondaatje's Literature of Silence

Annick Hillger

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780773578043
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Not Needing all the Words looks at Ondaatje's work in relation to the post-Cartesian idea of the modern subject as split and alienated. Highlighting the distinction between aesthesis and logic, Hillger traces the ways in which Ondaatje responds to the continuing process of silencing art in the modern age of reason.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Reading “Birch Bark” – How to Mourn the Loss of the Logos
• Part One an Aesthetics of Silence
• 1 Orpheus Is Dismembered
• 2 Writing Disaster: “Stars Who Implode into Silence”
• 3 “Moving to the Clear”: A Poetics of Process
• 4 The Dionysian Principle of Becoming
• Part Two Silencing Myths of Identity
• 5 The Young Poet and the Fathers of Can.lit.
• 6 The “Sphinx of the Unknown Land” Is a “Dainty Monster”
• 7 Odysseus Is Never Returning
• Part Three Weavers in a Sea of Silence
• 8 An Archaeology of the “Forgotten Mother”: Lilith and Ishtar
• 9 The Art of Healing: Mary, Conredemptrix
• Conclusion: “This Sweet Touch from the World”
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index