Dominika Ferens

Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice

Marcin Tereszewski

Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak

This interdisciplinary collection explores the diverse relationships between the frequently ignored and inherently ambiguous hinterlands and their manifestations in literature and culture. Moving away from perspectives that emphasize the marginality of hinterlands and present them as devoid of agency and “cultural currency”, this collection assembles a series of original essays using various modes of engagement to reconceptualize hinterlands and highlight their semiotic complexity. Apart from providing a reassessment of hinterlands in terms of their geocultural significance, this book also explores hinterlands through such concepts as nostalgia, heterotopia, identity formation, habitation, and cognitive mapping, with reference to a wide geographical field. Literary and filmic revisions of familiar hinterlands, such as the Australian outback, Alberta prairie, and Arizona desert, are juxtaposed in this volume with representations of such little-known European hinterlands as Lower Silesia and Ukraine, and the complicated political dimension of First World War internment camps is investigated with regard to Kapuskasing (Ontario). Rural China and the Sussex Downs are examined here as writers’ retreats. Inner-city hinterlands in Haiti, India, Morocco, and urban New Jersey take on new meaning when contrasted with the vast hinterlands of megacities like Johannesburg and Los Angeles. The spectrum of diverse approaches to hinterlands helps to reinforce their multilayered and multivocal nature as spaces that defy clear categorization.

Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands

Although Beckett scholarship has in recent decades experienced a renaissance as a result of various poststructuralist approaches that tend to emphasize destabilization and inexpressibility as the defining features of Beckett’s output, relatively little attention has been paid to the ethical aspects of his aesthetics of failure. This book fits into that renaissance, but draws on a distinct, though rarely addressed, connection that Samuel Beckett’s work shares with that of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. It is within this philosophical context that the significance of Beckett’s aesthetics of failure becomes most visible. Beckett’s work can be described as one of gradual reduction and disintegration of language, a stripping away of the tools rendering expression at all possible for the sake of approaching the inexpressible. Traditional representation yields to silence and linguistic aporia; language yields to images of absence and emptiness. The primary purpose of this study is to trace this movement of ‘unwording’ and analyze the role inexpressibility plays in Beckett’s prose in its visual, linguistic and ethical manifestations, as the aesthetics of inexpressibility is intrinsically bound with the ethical responsibility of literature understood as maintaining a relation with alterity.

Marcin Tereszewski

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