Why do writers turn to old stories to tell new tales?
This talk will examine the nature of reception by exploring the ways in which the St Lucian Nobel Prize-winning poet and dramatist, Derek Walcott, sought to contribute to the creation of a new Caribbean canon, and did so – at least in part – by engaging with canonical works from elsewhere and syncretising them with Caribbean forms.
Throughout his career, Walcott was in dialogue with the myths and literature of the ancient Mediterranean, with Dante’s poetry, and with Shakespeare’s plays. As a result, he was sometimes criticised for being in thrall to European canonical literature, but such a claim disregards the fundamental innovations integral to his mode of reception. Like Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s theorisation of Signifying as ‘repetition with signal difference’, Walcott’s engagement with canonical works is built on innovation more than replication.
From the reception of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Joyce in his best-known work, Omeros (1990), to his re-visioning of Ovid and Shakespeare in ‘The Almond Trees’ (1965), and of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Defoe in The Isle is Full of Noises (1982), Walcott radically rewrote canonical works to create a new classicism for the Caribbean. And in so doing, he asserted a prominent place for Caribbean art in a global, transhistorical canon.
Attendance is free, but booking is required to receive the Zoom link to attend.
Justine McConnell is Reader in Comparative Literature and Classical Reception at King's College, London. She is the author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939 (OUP, 2013), Performing Epic or Telling Tales (co-authored with Fiona Macintosh; OUP, 2020), and Derek Walcott and the Creation of a Classical Caribbean (Bloomsbury, 2023). She has also co-edited four volumes: Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood (OUP, 2011), The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (OUP, 2015), Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction since 1989 (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (OUP, 2018).
