Other Presences: Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Hospitality
Other Presences: Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Hospitality

Summary/Abstract: A stranger in Brazil, where she found home for 15 years, Bishop is known for her attentive depictions of landscapes, objects and animals. The article looks at the presences of others in her writing and postulates the possibility of an ethical impulse behind the restraint of Bishop’s poetic voice, her fondness of correspondence and her insistence on the importance of goodness. The inevitability of appropriation inherent in the acts of representation (or translation into language), countered by Bishop’s reticence, is viewed as gesture of hospitality, on whose challenges and/or impossibility Jacques Derrida commented in the 1996 seminars.

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