Prof. Norbert Bugeja’s book chapter ‘A Polity in Poetry? Notes on the Edge(s) of Memory in Stephanos Stephanides’s The Wind Under My Lips’, has just been published in a major new literary and cultural studies volume inspired by the lifework of foremost Cypriot intellectual, author and filmmaker Stephanos Stephanides. The volume, titled 'Shifting Horizons and Crossing Borders — Thinking with Stephanos Stephanides' is edited by Angelos Evangelou and has been published by Brill in its prestigious Cross/Cultures series.
Bugeja’s chapter reads Stephanides’s oeuvre as a poetic re-investment that injects the edges of recall — and of the European continent itself — with a creative grammar that tampers, in the storytelling process, with the very meaning of postcolonial space/s today. In this poetic grammar, or morphing-into-space of what happens inside, we sense an awakening or ‘opening up’ of the world to its subject as poetry becomes a mode of articulation that germinates in the crosswinds, arising from the conflicted and hybridised spaces of an itinerant life: be these indexed as aesthetic, cultural, or geographic ones.
The volume features a line-up of leading international scholars, writers and artists, including Susan Bassnett, David Dabydeen, Alev Adil, Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, GJV Prasad and other high-profile contributors. The volume also re-publishes and focuses further attention onto an in-depth conversation Bugeja had carried out with Stephanides for the Journal of Mediterranean Studies a few years ago, titled ‘Poetics of a Sea’.
In his appraisal of the volume, foremost literary scholar Djelal Kadir, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, has described it as ‘a kaleidoscopic scholarly and poetic treatment of the work of one of the most eloquent and versatile figures of contemporary culture. Stephanos Stephanides's oeuvre has overrun geographical, linguistic, poetic and genre borders, leaving a legacy for posterity that will also outrun time in the cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries. The voices in this volume that invoke and celebrate, in polyphony, the achievement of one of the most multifaceted cultural figures of our time comprise a collective of distinguished writers in their own right.’
As the book blurb explains, this volume ‘captures key moments in the critical and creative dialogue of literary scholars, poets and artists with poet, author, documentary film-maker and literary scholar Stephanos Stephanides. Employing a polyphonic and cross-disciplinary perspective, the twenty-three essays and creative pieces flow together in cycles of continuities and discontinuities, emulating Stephanides’s fluid and transgressive universe.’
Prof. Bugeja is a member of the Department of English and Director of the Mediterranean Institute.
Bugeja’s chapter reads Stephanides’s oeuvre as a poetic re-investment that injects the edges of recall — and of the European continent itself — with a creative grammar that tampers, in the storytelling process, with the very meaning of postcolonial space/s today. In this poetic grammar, or morphing-into-space of what happens inside, we sense an awakening or ‘opening up’ of the world to its subject as poetry becomes a mode of articulation that germinates in the crosswinds, arising from the conflicted and hybridised spaces of an itinerant life: be these indexed as aesthetic, cultural, or geographic ones.
The volume features a line-up of leading international scholars, writers and artists, including Susan Bassnett, David Dabydeen, Alev Adil, Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, GJV Prasad and other high-profile contributors. The volume also re-publishes and focuses further attention onto an in-depth conversation Bugeja had carried out with Stephanides for the Journal of Mediterranean Studies a few years ago, titled ‘Poetics of a Sea’.
In his appraisal of the volume, foremost literary scholar Djelal Kadir, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, has described it as ‘a kaleidoscopic scholarly and poetic treatment of the work of one of the most eloquent and versatile figures of contemporary culture. Stephanos Stephanides's oeuvre has overrun geographical, linguistic, poetic and genre borders, leaving a legacy for posterity that will also outrun time in the cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries. The voices in this volume that invoke and celebrate, in polyphony, the achievement of one of the most multifaceted cultural figures of our time comprise a collective of distinguished writers in their own right.’
As the book blurb explains, this volume ‘captures key moments in the critical and creative dialogue of literary scholars, poets and artists with poet, author, documentary film-maker and literary scholar Stephanos Stephanides. Employing a polyphonic and cross-disciplinary perspective, the twenty-three essays and creative pieces flow together in cycles of continuities and discontinuities, emulating Stephanides’s fluid and transgressive universe.’
Prof. Bugeja is a member of the Department of English and Director of the Mediterranean Institute.