accueil
portrait
portrait
portrait
portrait
portrait
portrait
portrait
© 2008 - Une réalisation Symbiose Informatique - Création graphique : Sucré Salé     fr    us

Grounding a World

Essays on the work of Kenneth White
The St Andrews Symposium, organised by Gavin Bowd and Charles Forsdick at the University of St Andrews – 10-11 October 2003
Edited by Gavin Bowd, Charles Forsdick and Norman Bissell.
Glasgow, Alba Editions, 2005.


Editors’ presentation

     Grounding a World is a significant landmark in the cultural life of Scotland and beyond. It presents the first comprehensive analysis in the English language of the work of Kenneth White, the internationally renowned Scottish poet, prose writer, essayist and teacher who lives in France but considers himself a citizen of the world.
     This essay-book contains fresh insights into his work by scholars and authors from Scotland, France, Morocco, Italy and England who have unrivalled knowledge of this live mind and original voice whose poetics and teachings open up a new field of culture and present a way of life founded on a sensitive and intelligent relationship to the earth.
     These essays follow Kenneth White on his journeys from the city to open country, from Scotland to South-East Asia, from Labrador to Arab lands, and explore the intellectual pathways by which he goes beyond both Western and Eastern thinking to found and ground a new world outlook. They examine his relationship to self and creativity, shamanism and Buddhism, modernism and the literary canon, and his ability to pull the doors of the mind off their hinges and exult in grounded living.
     Kenneth White himself contributes a new essay which sets out his ideas for radical cultural renewal based on geopoetics, that theory-practice which is already showing its stimulating applicability to several domains of research and creation.
     Grounding a World is a rich and accessible source book for both serious students of the work of Kenneth White and those new to it who are on the look-out for something with real innovative power on the intellectual, literary, cultural and political horizon.

Extracts
Contents

Introduction by Gavin Bowd
Kenneth White : A Transcendental Scot, by Tony McManus
Kenneth White as Educator, by Norman Bissell
Walking the Edge : Kenneth White’s Landscape-Mindscape, by Olivier Delbard
The Dialectics of Outside and Inside, by Khalid Hajji
Kenneth White : The Self and Creativity, by John Hudson
Space, Energy, Light : the Shamanic Element in the Work of Kenneth White, by Mike Tucker
Kenneth White and Religion, by Pierre Jamet
A Geographer of the Mind : Kenneth White as reader and writer, by Anne Bineau
Kenneth White and Victor Segalen, by Charles Forsdick
From Waste Land to White World, by Michèle Duclos
In Arab Lands : A Geopoetic Sketch, by Omar Bsaïthi
On Exactness : Reading Kenneth White in the Twenty-first Century, by Anne Scott
Geopoetics and Architecture, by Jean-Paul Loubes
Canons to the Left of Him, Canons to the Right of Him : Kenneth White and the Construction of the Scottish Literary History, by Stuart Kelly
Grounding a World, by Kenneth White