The Wanderer and His Charts. Exploring the Fields of Vagrant Thought and Vagabond Beauty. Essays on Cultural Revolution

by Kenneth White

Following on from On Scottish Ground, this book moves further into White's mental cartography. A first part, 'The Intellectual Nomad', lays out the practice of intellectual nomadism, based on White's explorations and researches from culture to culture across the world. A second part, 'Place and Space', gathers together essays written in the environment of a mountain and frontier country (the Pyrenees), and in a coastal area (North Brittany): it concerns what White calls 'geopoetics', a theory that attempts to get back into the root of culture and start again afresh. In the third part, 'A Cultural Project', White turns his attention specifically to Scotland with propositions for radical cultural renewal. In White's hands, the essay is no mere literary plaything or impressionistic rambling, it is a vehicle of fast cogent thinking. The sheer scope of the information and the clarity of the arguments are hard to find anywhere else.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Kenneth White was a Scottish poet, academic and writer. He spent his formative years in Fairlie in Ayrshire.

White obtained a double first in French and German from the University of Glasgow. From 1959 until 1963, he studied at the University of Paris, where he obtained a state doctorate. He purchased Gourgounel, an old farm in the Ardèche region of France, where he could spend the summers and autumns studying and working on what would become Letters from Gourgounel.

In 1963, White returned to the University of Glasgow, where he lectured in French literature until 1967. Then, disillusioned by the contemporary British literary and poetry scene, he resigned from the University and moved to the city of Pau, near the Pyrenees, in south-west France, where he lectured in English at the University of Bordeaux. He was expelled from the University after his involvement in the student protests of May 1968. After leaving the University of Bordeaux, White remained at Pau and lectured at the University of Paris VII from 1969 until 1983, when he left the Pyrenees for the north coast of Brittany, and a new position as the chair of 20th century poetics at Paris-Sorbonne.

In 1989, White founded the International Institute of Geopoetics to further promote research into the cross-cultural, transdisciplinary field of study which he had been developing during the previous decade.

White held honorary doctorates from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and the Open University. He was an honorary member of the Royal Scottish Academy, and a visiting professor at Scotland's UHI Millennium Institute.