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Article Dans Une Revue Nordic Irish Studies Année : 2014

The Choreography of Exile in Colum McCann's Fiction.

Résumé

The choreography of exile in Colum McCann's fiction Colum McCann's bestselling novel Dancer 1 about the life of the famous dancer Nureyev gives the most blatant example of the theme of dancing in McCann's work of fiction. But the scope of dancing and movement in McCann's work goes beyond any use of dancing as a thematic element of storytelling. Dance, gestures and bodily movements in general are actually extremely meaningful in all his writing, not only as a theme but also as a literary trope and further, as part of an aesthetic of exile. In Colum McCann's fiction, dancing is very often a way for exiles to truly inhabit the new space they have landed in and to transform it into a lived-in place. Dancing is a way for the characters to escape past and present traumas and project themselves in the future. In short, it is a means for them to make a home. We will therefore question the relationships between dancing and landscape in Colum McCann's writings and study the way in which choreography and fiction writing are linked when it comes to narrating the experience of exile and expressing the singularity of one's experience of space. More specifically, we will focus on the links between dance, memory and landscape in Colum McCann's collection of short stories Fishing the Sloe-Black River 2 (1994), making connections with his novels and his more recent short stories. 'Landscape' is understood here as a concept which 'materializes space by implicitly introducing a viewer and a gaze, while abstracting place by adjoining a critical point of view to it 3 '. Landscapes engender memories of the past and of the exiles' past homeland while dancing bodies inscribe and project a form of hope into space. Therefore, drawing upon the phrase used by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra 4 , we will first focus on 'the gravity of exile' in the collection: for dancing can be perceived as a way of escaping the spirit of gravity which sees life as a burden to be borne. In
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hal-01913520 , version 1 (19-11-2018)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01913520 , version 1

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Marie Mianowski. The Choreography of Exile in Colum McCann's Fiction.. Nordic Irish Studies, 2014, pp.31-42. ⟨hal-01913520⟩
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