‘It was suddenly hard winter’: John Burnside’s Crossings

• Published in: Études britanniques contemporaines Vol. 48; no. 48
• Main Author: Wolfreys, Julian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée 01.06.2015; Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
• Subjects: Burnside (John); crossings; deconstruction; otherness; phenomenology; époché; crossings; poetics; poétique; Burnside (John); époché; l’autre; traversées; deconstruction; phénoménologie; phenomenology; otherness; déconstruction; revenance

John Burnside’s poetry and fiction presents the reader with an awkward, uncanny sense of Being. It achieves this through forcing on the reader moments of suspension—epoché in the sense given this word by German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl—which both present and enact shifts in perception of the r...