Kazuo Ishiguro’s Gestural Poetics

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Through readings of Ishiguro’s repurposing of key elements of realism and modernism; his interest in childhood imagination and sketching; interrogation of aesthetics and ethics; his fascination with architecture and the absent home; and his expressionist use of ‘imaginary’ space and place, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Gestural Poetics examines the manner in which Ishiguro’s fictions approach, but never quite reveal, the ineffable, inexpressible essence of his narrators’ emotionally fraught worlds.
Reformulating Martin Heidegger’s suggestion that the ‘essence of world can only be indicated’ as ‘the essence of world can only be gestured towards,‘ Sloane argues that while Ishiguro’s novels and short stories are profoundly sensitive to the limitations of literary form, their narrators are, to varying degrees, equally keenly attuned to the failures of language itself. In order to communicate something of the emotional worlds of characters adrift in various uncertainties, while also commenting on the expressive possibilities of fiction and the mimetic arts more widely, Ishiguro appropriates a range of metaphors which enable both author and character to gesture towards the undisclosable essences of fiction and being.

Peter Sloane is a Lecturer in Contemporary Anglophone Literature at the University of Lincoln, UK. He is the author of David Foster Wallace and the Body (2019), and is currently working on his next book project, a study of Altruism and the Arts 1900-Present.

List of AbbreviationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1. Gestures
Part 1 Realism
Part 2 Modernism
2. Imagination
Part 1 Games
Part 2 Childhood Arts
3. Aesthetics
4. Architext
5. Space
Conclusion: The Remains of the …
ReferencesIndex

“Kazuo Ishiguro’s Gestural Poetics is a mature work that testifies to the maturing of Ishiguro studies, whilst offering an enticing series of avenues for other scholars (and perhaps Sloane himself) to pursue in the coming years. It is also a piece of scholarship marked by unashamed love of the work, and all the better for it.” —English Studies“Peter Sloane’s significant and perceptive book argues that Ishiguro’s novels gesture towards rather than express their meanings. Following this powerful insight, he weaves together the most acute and precise critical readings with related philosophical and theoretical ideas to produce an illuminating reading of all Ishiguro’s work to date: a major work of scholarship on one of the world’s leading writers.” —Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway University of London, UK“Peter Sloane’s study of Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s writings is meticulous and insightful. He has redrawn the limits of literary criticism and of philosophical and aesthetic elements in Ishiguro’s fiction. His eloquent chapters bring the unknowable to light, the ineffable to our senses, and will prove to be an important contribution to Ishiguro studies.” —Cynthia F. Wong, Professor of English, University of Colorado Denver, USA“Across a book whose own critical disposition consciously models the very gestural strategies to which it attends, Peter Sloane limns the thresholds of fraught expression and partially disclosed implication that readers have long found so beguiling in Ishiguro’s fiction. By patiently accompanying and explicating evanescent forms of signification, he tracks moments of protean insight and unsettling inarticulacy that are easily passed over. An expert portrait of a ‘delicately experimental’ novelist emerges that helps us to understand how Ishiguro turns the task of confronting ineffable dimensions of experience into a virtue.” —David James, Chair in Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of Birmingham, UK, and author of Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation

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