Facing Trauma in Contemporary American Literary Discourse
Facing Trauma in Contemporary American Literary Discourse

Author: Laura Virginia Castor

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-10-08

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1527541223

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Trauma has always been part of the American collective experience, but only since September 11, 2001 has it been acknowledged on a widespread scale. Most people will experience some form of trauma during their lifetime, but in contemporary American culture, it is often understood as a problem to be blamed on someone, fought, or repressed entirely. Despite burgeoning trauma studies, popular responses to trauma – from the media to politics – produce ever more aggression and fear. This book responds to this growing awareness through literary analyses of texts by Louise Erdrich, Siri Hustvedt, Melanie Thernstrom, Nicole Krauss, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Toni Morrison. Considered separately, each chapter provides a lens into a historically-situated trauma and the process of renegotiating it. Read together, they function as voices in an ongoing conversation that affirms the power of narrative. A good story can become a space for curiosity in the face of trauma and uncertainty. A story opens imaginative possibilities for asking, “in what ways can readers bring more awareness to the benefits of seeing our planetary interdependence in the midst of global polarization?” The readings of novels, autobiographical texts, and poems here suggest how this question is among the most valuable we can ask in the early 21st century.

Facing Trauma in Contemporary American Literary Discourse
Facing Trauma in Contemporary American Literary Discourse

Author: Laura Virginia Castor

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-11

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 9781527538139

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Trauma has always been part of the American collective experience, but only since September 11, 2001 has it been acknowledged on a widespread scale. Most people will experience some form of trauma during their lifetime, but in contemporary American culture, it is often understood as a problem to be blamed on someone, fought, or repressed entirely. Despite burgeoning trauma studies, popular responses to trauma â " from the media to politics â " produce ever more aggression and fear. This book responds to this growing awareness through literary analyses of texts by Louise Erdrich, Siri Hustvedt, Melanie Thernstrom, Nicole Krauss, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Toni Morrison. Considered separately, each chapter provides a lens into a historically-situated trauma and the process of renegotiating it. Read together, they function as voices in an ongoing conversation that affirms the power of narrative. A good story can become a space for curiosity in the face of trauma and uncertainty. A story opens imaginative possibilities for asking, â oein what ways can readers bring more awareness to the benefits of seeing our planetary interdependence in the midst of global polarization?â The readings of novels, autobiographical texts, and poems here suggest how this question is among the most valuable we can ask in the early 21st century.

The Nature of Trauma in American Novels
The Nature of Trauma in American Novels

Author: Michelle Balaev

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2012-06-11

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 0810128195

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"This book examines literary trauma theory from its foundations to its implementations and new possibilities. ... [A]n analysis that reconsiders the meaning and value of traumatic experience by demonstrating the diversity of its forms in contemporary Amerian novels in an effort to deepen the discussion of trauma beyond that of the disease-driven paradigm in literary criticism today. ... [The author's] model views trauma and the process of remembering within a framework that emphasizes the multiplicity of responses to an extreme experience and the importance of contextual factors in detemining the significance of the event. In order to demonstrate this new approach, [she focuses her] discussion on late-modern canonical and emergent American novels that deal with trauma. In analyzing the narrative methods authors employ to portray suffering, [she] found two major patterns: the use of landscape imagery to convey the effects of trauma and remembering, and the use of place as a site that shapes the protagonist's experience and perception of the world."--Introduction.

The Generation of Postmemory
The Generation of Postmemory

Author: Marianne Hirsch

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0231156529

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large. In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new understanding of history and our place in it.

Trauma and Literature
Trauma and Literature

Author: J. Roger Kurtz

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-03-15

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1316821277

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

As a concept, 'trauma' has attracted a great deal of interest in literary studies. A key term in psychoanalytic approaches to literary study, trauma theory represents a critical approach that enables new modes of reading and of listening. It is a leading concept of our time, applicable to individuals, cultures, and nations. This book traces how trauma theory has come to constitute a discrete but influential approach within literary criticism in recent decades. It offers an overview of the genesis and growth of literary trauma theory, recording the evolution of the concept of trauma in relation to literary studies. In twenty-one essays, covering the origins, development, and applications of trauma in literary studies, Trauma and Literature addresses the relevance and impact this concept has in the field.

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]
Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]

Author: Linda De Roche

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-06-04

Total Pages: 1563

ISBN-13: 1440853592

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature
Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature

Author: Joelle Mann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-28

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1000405664

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral investigates the formation and formulation of the contemporary novel through a historical analysis of voice studies and media studies. After situating research through voices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, this book examines the expressions of a multi-media vocality, examining the interactions among cultural polemics, aesthetic forms, and changing media in the twenty-first century. The novel studies shown here trace the ways in which the viral aesthetics of the contemporary novel move language out of context, recontextualizing human testimony by galvanizing mixed media forms that shape contemporary literature in our age of networks. Through readings of American authors such as Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, Joseph O’Neill, Michael Cunningham, and Colum McCann, the book considers how voice acts as a site where identities combine, conform, and are questioned relationally. By listening to and tracing the spoken and unspoken voices of the novel, the author identifies a politics of listening and speaking in our mediated, informational society.

A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11
A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11

Author: Katharina Donn

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 131730862X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The 9/11 attacks brought large-scale violence into the 21st century with force and have come to epitomize the entanglement of intimate vulnerability and virtual spectacle that is typical of the globalized present. This book works at the intersection of trauma studies, affect theory, and literary studies to offer radically new interpretive frames for interrogating the challenges inherent in representing the initial moments of the terrorist encounter. Beyond the paradigm of traumatic unspeakability, post-9/11 texts expose the materiality of the human body in its universal vulnerability. The intersubjective empathy this engenders is politically subversive, as it undermines the discourse of historical singularity and exceptionalism by establishing a global network of reference and dialogue. Innovative theoretical interconnections between clinical pathology, concepts of cultural trauma, and political aesthetics lay the foundations for exploring formally and geographically diverse texts. Close readings of works by Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, Don DeLillo, and William Gibson map the relationship between representations of 9/11 and complex aspects of trauma theory. This detailed approach makes a case for revisiting trauma theory and bringing its Freudian origins into the digitized present. It showcases trauma as a physical and psychological wound as well as an experience that is simultaneously pre-discursive and inhibited by the virtuality of the present-day real. Exploring how contemporary trauma studies can take into account the digitization and virtuality of present-day realities, this book is a key intervention in establishing a contemporary ethics of witnessing terror.

The New American West in Literature and the Arts
The New American West in Literature and the Arts

Author: Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1000092836

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The story of the American West is that of a journey. It is the story of a movement, of a geographical and human transition, of the delineation of a route that would soon become a rooted myth. The story of the American West has similarly journeyed across boundaries, in a two-way movement, sometimes feeding the idea of that myth, sometimes challenging it. This collection of essays relates to the notion of the traveling essence of the myth of the American West from different geographical and disciplinary standpoints. The volume originates in Europe, in Spain, where the myth traveled, was received, assimilated, and re-presented. It intends to travel back to the West, in a two-way cross-cultural journey, which will hopefully contribute to the delineation of the New—always self-renewing—American West. It includes the work of authors of both sides of the Atlantic ocean who propose a cross-cultural, transdisciplinary dialogue upon the idea, the geography and the representation of the American West.

Bearing Witness
Bearing Witness

Author: Karen O'Donnell

Publisher: SCM Press

Published: 2022-08-31

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0334061172

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Much like theology itself, the experience of trauma has the potential to reach into almost any aspect of life, refusing to fit within the tramlines. A follow up to the 2020 volume "Feminist Trauma Theologies", "Bearing Witness" explores further into global, intersectional, and as yet relatively unexplored perspectives. With a particular focus on poverty, gender and sexualities, race and ethnicity, and health in dialogue with trauma theology the book seeks to demonstrate both the far reaching and intersectional nature of trauma, encouraging creative and ground-breaking theological reflections on trauma and constructions of theology in the light of the trauma experience. A unique set of insights into the real-life experience of trauma, the book includes chapters authored by a diverse group of academic theologians, practitioners and activists. The result is a theology which extend far into the public square