Traces of Self-Reflexivity and Meta-Poetics in Lawrence Durrell’s Cities, Plains, and People: The Transition from Modernism to Postmodernism

Ibrahim, Emad Said Elsayed Ibrahim

doi:10.21608/opde.2019.133839

Traces of Self-Reflexivity and Meta-Poetics in Lawrence Durrell’s Cities, Plains, and People: The Transition from Modernism to Postmodernism

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Emad Said Elsayed Ibrahim Ibrahim

10.21608/opde.2019.133839

Abstract

The present study focuses on Durrell’s transition to postmodernism through investigating the self-reflexivity exposed in his long poem “Cities, Plains, and People”(1946). Integral to the study also is Durrell’s ardent passion for corresponding landscapes to art. No wonder, thus, to find Durrell as a devotee to the Einstein’s concept of time-space continuum which views time as the fourth dimension of space. Consequently, guided by a Bakhtinian chronotopic structuring, Durrell fuses time and place in one unit. Therefore, through selecting a chronotopic structure of the journey, the development of Durrell as an artist and the revealing of his views on the artistic creative processes shall be investigated in studying the sixteen-part poem “Cities, Plains, and People” as a meta-poem

Keywords