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In the Beginning was the (Written) Word
Author(s) -
Champion Margrét Gunnarsdóttir
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.2008.00909.x
Subject(s) - mythology , trace (psycholinguistics) , subject (documents) , literature , postmodernism , space (punctuation) , action (physics) , philosophy , history , aesthetics , sociology , linguistics , art , computer science , quantum mechanics , library science , physics
A pivotal text within Peter Ackroyd's oeuvre, Hawksmoor is most fruitfully read as a kind of mythography where a special version of deconstructive play dominates all levels of the fiction, from single words through characters and action to the level of meta‐reflection itself. In fact, the novel's design can be said to reflect the philosophy of space of the eighteenth‐century architect Nicholas Dyer: his seven churches are embodiments of différance , subtly infusing alterior knowledge into urban reality. Similarly, Hawksmoor ’s ‘‘vision‐house of language,’’ its post‐structuralist myth, advocates the post‐1968 Derridean/Deleuzean enterprise of reterritorialization – of reconnecting the uprooted postmodern subject to estranged territory. At the base of this myth, mobilizing it as its non‐originary source, as the exemplary figure of the trace , is the child, the spatial thinker in the novel; by folding language into the city of London, the Derridean child imagines the permeable bounds between building/dwelling/thinking, encouraging individuals to transgress them and, in Ackroyd's words, to re‐situate themselves in ‘‘the riddle of London, which is perpetually new and always old.’’