Shaping the Text, Shaping the Mind: Wilson Harris’s Employment of Creative Imagination as a Technique to Recreate Perception
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Though intention is a very problematic topic in literary studies (and even more in postcolonial literary criticism due to the prevailing distrust of ideologies), I would like to discuss the intuitive as well as controlled way Wilson Harris shapes his texts and possible influence of these texts on a creative transformation of the mind of the reader –particularly the transformation of perception and understanding of reality which is being adopted by individuals as well as communities through the interaction with dominant epistemology. I argue that through employment of various literary techniques, Harris manages to overcome some of the stereotypical perceptions of the world and he transgresses some of the culturally imposed boundaries created by the long-term hegemony of western philosophical tradition in education and throughout the academia. Through intertextuality, merger of mythology, dream, and historical records, Harris dissolves traditional literary and perceptive barriers and helps to transform the way the reader can perceive the world. Texts dense with metaphors and fluid images working on several time-space levels show the reader numerous possibilities of viewing and understanding the world (physical as well as psychological) thus allowing broader insight and overcoming the limitations of hegemonic, usually constricted, points of view that typically juxtapose some characteristics presenting them as oppositional. Harris’s work allows for possibility of coexistence, and even complementarity, of elements of paradoxical nature. |