Bordering Binarities and Cognitive Cartography: What on Earth Does Literature Have to do with Border Transactions?

Ruben Moi

doi:10.7557/13.1467

Authors

Ruben Moi University of Tromsø

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/13.1467

Keywords:

Oscar Wilde, Paul Muldoon, The Plot, grenselitteratur,

Abstract

Although literature and poetry have numerous borders of their own,these are rarely assumed to have any significance for the world out-side the text itself. A number of reasons for this distinctive division certainly stem from the literary field itself. This paper intends to indicate the exclusivist stance of some theories of literature, and the inclucivist of others, before exploring the possibilities of bridging between borders in text and territory by reference to the life and literature of Oscar Wilde and a performative and imaginative analysis of Paul Muldoon's epigrammatic poem The Plot.

Author Biography

Ruben Moi, University of Tromsø

Ruben Moi is Research Fellow in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Tromsø and a member of the university's research group Border Poetics. At present, he is working on a project entitled From the Frontiers of Writing: Ekphrasis and Transgressionality in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetics and on a monograph on the Irish-American poet Paul Muldoon. He has published articles and book chapters on Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, T. S. Eliot, Martin McDonagh and Irvine Welsh.