Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris ( born March 24, 1921 in New Amsterdam ) is a Guyanese writer who is best known for his novels. In addition, he also published poetry and essays.

Life and work

Harris studied at Georgetown. He served as surveyor some expeditions into the interior of Guyana, before he emigrated in 1959 to England, where in 1960 he his first novel Palace of the Peacock published. Together with the three subsequent novels, he makes Harris ' so-called Guyana Quartet. Harris's work is influenced by his time as a surveyor; it often plays in the Guyanese hinterland is rich in landscape descriptions. A recurring theme is the relationship of Western culture to the colonized territories and peoples. He repeatedly relies Caribbean and South American myths in relation to fundamental works of European literature, and attempts to uncover parallels that will enable new perspectives on both cultures. In his Carnival Trilogy he deals with some of the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy and the Faust material. His style is abstract, complex and partially fantastic; the realism he refuses because he associates it with imperialism and holds it for the description of Caribbean and South American environments for inadequate.

Various critics undertook experiments, literature historical dimension of Harris ' work; he himself expressed his categorizations hostile towards. Frequent comparisons refer to the literary modernity and the Magic Realism. Although he expressed admiration for Alejo Carpentier and Octavio Paz, Harris had this concept as such but back because he considers him to be an inappropriate simplification. He turns out a sympathy for the coined by John Keats Negative Capability term - to accept the demand for the ability of the artist that not every complex issue could be easily resolved. Explicitly rejecting he spoke against postmodern poetics, which he regards as " nihilistic ". His theoretical writings are marked as existentialist, sometimes they also have a close to the positions of Martin Buber and Carl Gustav Jung.

Harris was twice awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature; In 2010 he was made a Knight Bachelor. To date, he always refused permission to write a biography of him, since he considers all the important information about him are to be found in his work.

Bibliography

Novels

  • Palace of the Peacock, 1960
  • The Far Journey of Oudin, 1961
  • The Whole Armour, 1962
  • The Secret Ladder, 1963
  • Heartland, 1964
  • The Eye of the Scarecrow 1965
  • The Waiting Room, 1967
  • Tumatumari, 1968
  • Ascent to Omai, 1970
  • The Sleepers of Roraima, 1970
  • The Age of the Rainmakers in 1971
  • Black Marsden: A Tabula Rasa Comedy, 1972
  • Companions of the Day and Night, 1975
  • Enigma of Values ​​: An Introduction, 1975
  • Da Silva da Silva 's Cultivated Wilderness / Genesis of the Clowns, 1977
  • The Tree of the Sun, 1978
  • Carnival 1985
  • The Infinite Rehearsal, 1987
  • The Four Banks of the River of Space, 1990
  • The Carnival Trilogy ( Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal, The Four Banks of the River of Space ), 1993
  • Jonestown, 1996
  • The Dark Jester, 2001
  • The Mask of the Beggar, 2003
  • The Ghost of Memory, 2006

Stories

  • The Sleepers of Roraima, 1970
  • The Age of the Rainmakers in 1971

Poetry

  • Fetish Miniature Poets Series, 1951
  • The Well and the Country, 1952
  • Eternity to Season, 1954

Essays and Lectures

  • Tradition and the West Indian Novel, 1965
  • Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays, 1967
  • History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guianas, 1970
  • Fossil and Psyche, 1974
  • Explorations: A Series of Talks and Articles 1966 - 1981, 1981
  • The Womb of Space: The Cross -Cultural Imagination, 1983
  • The Radical Imagination ( essays ), 1992
  • Selected Essays, 1999
New Amsterdam (Guyana) Georgetown (Guyana) Postmodern literature Integrated Authority File
825326
de