White, Kenneth | Aberdeen University Press | The University of Aberdeen

White, Kenneth

Kenneth White has been living and working in France since 1968. The founder of the International Institute of Geopoetics and, from 1983 to 1996, Professor of Modern Poetry at the Sorbonne, his poetry, essays and travel writings, published in both French and English, and translated into a wide range of other languages, have won many distinguished prizes.

Collected Works, Volume 1: Underground to Otherground

White, Kenneth (2016) The Collected Works of Kenneth White, Volume I: Underground to Otherground, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, pp340+viii. ISBN:978-1-857520-40-8

Incandescent Limbo
Letters from Gourgounel
Travels in the Drifting Dawn

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The three books contained in this first volume of Kenneth White's Collected Works present the beginnings of one of the most radical and exhilarating figures in modern literature.

Incandescent Limbo recounts White's years in Paris. Many a writer in the modern era had made Paris a focal point of his or her activity, but probably no one made more of it or got more out of it than Kenneth White. While exploring a labyrinthine underworld, the book is fundamentally an autoanalysis and traces the birth of the writer as an intellectual nomad.

Letters from Gourgounel takes us from the city to a wild part of south-eastern France, the Ardèche, where White undertakes a resourcing in an elementary context. Hailed in England as a 'fascinating curiosity of literature', this book not only made White famous overnight in France, it was seen there as a turning point in the contemporary situation.

In a third book, Travels in the Drifting Dawn, the intellectual nomad begins his moves across territories and cultures. After passing through the London underground of the sixties, then delving into the ground of his native Scotland and neighbouring Ireland, we shift back to the Continent, accumulating experience on different levels in France, Spain, Belgium, Holland, before concluding the cycle in North Africa. The trilogy is not only a summary of White's itinerary in its initial stages, it opens up a whole intellectual and cultural programme.

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Guido's Map: A European Pilgrimage

White, Kenneth (2015) Guido's Map: A European Pilgrimage, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, pp.154 + xii. ISBN: 978-1-85752-011-8

It's a strange map of Europe that Kenneth White presents in Guido's Map. In an apparently haphazard way, he moves over spaces and among places, ranging from Ireland to the Balkans via Spain, from Glasgow to Trieste via Bilbao. History, past and present, breaks into the geography, figures such as Joyce, Rimbaud, Rilke appear more or less furtively on the scene here and there. What finally emerges is not only a spectral analysis of a complex area called Europe but the lineaments of a whole continent of the mind, alive with existential energy and intellectual electricity.

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The Winds of Vancouver: A Nomadic Report from the North Pacific Edge

White, Kenneth (2013) The Winds of Vancouver: A Nomadic Report from the North Pacific Edge, Aberdeen: Reseach Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, pp.114 + vi. ISBN: 978-1-906108-24-3

His writings are explorations across a vast range of intellectual territories, and also, in what he calls his 'waybooks', chart his actual travels across varied geographic territories. The Winds of Vancouver records a journey from British Columbia to Alaska, retracing the itineraries of explorers, naturalists and environmentalists, many of them, such as John Muir, nomadic Scots like White himself. The narrative records a series of encounters, both historical and contemporary, between the modern and the primordial, as White goes in search of what is beyond the limits of the known world.

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Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath: Essays

White, Kenneth (2013) Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath: Essays, Aberdeen: Reseach Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, pp.214 + x. ISBN: 978-1-906108-17-5

As in all his essay writing, Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath investigates the intersections between literature, science, philosophy, and the cultural histories which shape individual existence, exploring the many ways in which geopoetics can both illuminate and challenge the world in which we live.

Following in the tracks of intellectual nomads like himself, from Celtic monks moving out across Western Europe to Arthur Rimbaud's tracks in Abyssinia, White charts a network of cross-connections between explorers of new territories, both physical and psychological. He also sets out to situate his own work in its local, Scottish environment and to see that environment in a cosmic scale, seeking the 'edge-knowledge' from which a new paradigm for cultural understanding can emerge.

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Latitudes and Longitudes: Poems

White, Kenneth (2013) Latitudes and Longitudes: Poems, Aberdeen: Reseach Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, pp.139 + xii. ISBN: 978-1-906108-16-8

White's work has always been global in scale and local in concentration and in this new book of poems, his first since his collected poems, Open World (2003), he travels out from Scotland across Europe to traverse the Americas and Asia before coming back to Armorica, the northern French coast where he now has his home. Populated by intellectual nomads like himself, from the medieval philosopher Erigena by way of David Hume to Edmund Husserl, Latitudes & Longitudes charts alternative paths through the cultural inheritance of both West and East, in order to recover a fundamental earth-poetics.

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