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This is the first book on Naomi Alderman’s literary production, and highlights the writer’s transcultural recasting of British and Jewish traditions. The four novels analysed here prove to be relevant, not only from a literary viewpoint, but also from the fields of ethics, spirituality and politics. The analysis thus focuses on issues such as alterity and respect towards the other in a globalized context. As such, the book will be of interest to literary critics, researchers, and students in the fields of literature, ethics, and social and cultural studies. The reader will find in the text a comprehensive approach to a young writer who undoubtedly deserves attention given her interrogation of varied and socially relevant topics, including gender and sexual orientation in the early twenty-first century, the rewriting of the Sacred Scriptures, and the discourse of feminist posthuman dystopias.
The working hypothesis of the book is that, since the 1990s, an increasing number of Anglophone fictions are responding to the new ethical and political demands arising out of the facts of war, exclusion, climate change, contagion, posthumanism and other central issues of our post-trauma age by adapting the conventions of traditional forms of expressing grievability, such as elegy, testimony or (pseudo-)autobiography. Situating themselves in the wake of Judith Butler’s work on (un-)grievablability, the essays collected in this volume seek to cast new light on these issues by delving into the socio-cultural constructions of grievability and other types of vulnerabilities, invisibilities and inaudibilities linked with the neglect and/or abuse of non-normative individuals and submerged groups that have been framed as disposable, exploitable and/or unmournable by such determinant factors as sex, gender, ethnic origin, health, etc., thereby refining and displacing the category of subalternity associated with the poetics of postmodernism.
This collection of critical essays finds itself at the intersection of cultural, literary and film studies, and explores the various ways in which dysfunction is expressed in Irish studies. Dysfunction can be regarded as part and parcel of a portrayal of a landscape of trauma and crisis that may have been traditionally repressed in Ireland at large. However, dysfunction also envisages mediation, managing, transcending and healing. As such, this volume examines how Ireland tackles dysfunction at large, but more importantly, how mediation, managing, healing and transcending help in the understanding of the ever-changing and on-going process of the construction of an Irish identity today; sometimes looking back at the past, but always creating the need of inventing new ways to understand the future of Ireland. The collection presents essays which tackle dysfunction from different and multifarious perspectives that range from sociological, historical and literary discourses to more contemporary insights into dysfunction in today’s Ireland. It encompasses theory and analysis and includes the works of both senior academics and emerging scholars, as well as those outside academia.
Preliminary material /Editors Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction -- INTRODUCTION /JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU and SUSANA ONEGA -- READING TRAUMA IN PAT BARKER'S REGENERATION TRILOGY /LENA STEVEKER -- THE ETHICAL CLOCK OF TRAUMA IN EVA FIGES' WINTER JOURNEY /SILVIA PELLICER-ORTÍN -- “NOBODY'SMEAT”: REVISITING RAPE AND SEXUAL TRAUMA THROUGH ANGELA CARTER /CHARLEY BAKER -- “A NEW ALGEBRA”: THE POETICS AND ETHICS OF TRAUMA IN J.G. BALLARD'S THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION /JAKOB WINNBERG -- TRAUMA AS THE NEGATION OF AUTONOMY: MICHAEL MOORCOCK'S MOTHER LONDON /JEAN-MICHEL GANTEAU -- WHERE MADNESS LIES: HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION AND THE ETHICS OF FORM IN MARTIN AMIS' TIME'S ARROW /MARÍA JE...
This volume provides a comprehensive account of how scholarship on affect and scholarship on texts have come to inform one another over the past few decades. The result has been that explorations of how texts address, elicit, shape, and dramatize affect have become central to contemporary work in literary, film, and art criticism, as well as in critical theory, rhetoric, performance studies, and aesthetics. Guiding readers to the variety of topics, themes, interdisciplinary dialogues, and sub-disciplinary specialties that the study of interplay between affect and texts has either inaugurated or revitalized, the handbook showcases and engages the diversity of scholarly topics, approaches, and projects that thinking of affect in relation to texts and related media open up or enable. These include (but are not limited to) investigations of what attention to affect brings to established methods of studying texts—in terms of period, genre, cultural contexts, rhetoric, and individual authorship.
Writing from a vantage point that respects tribal specificities and Indigenous sovereignty, the essays in this volume consider the relational place-worlds crafted by the Native American authors Louise Erdrich, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Gordon Henry Jr., Louis Owens, James Welch, Heid E. Erdrich, Ofelia Zepeda, and Simon J. Ortiz. Each is set in conversation with kindred writers and larger sociopolitical debates in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The shared aim is to decolonize academic methodologies and disciplines across the Atlantic by tracing the creative, spiritual, and intellectual networks that Native writers have established with other communities at home and around the world. Key issues to arise include Native American/Indigenous theories and literary practices that center on relationality, the planetary turn, grounded normativity, trans-Indigeneity, transborder identities, movement, journeying, migration, multilingualism, genomic research, futurity, ecology, and justice.
Pop art has traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the “low” into the “high”. The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term “Gaga Aesthetics” characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa. Taking Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry" and Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as key touchstones, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics and the extent to which it still applied, and the extent to which it has radically shifted, ther...
Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to help define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English.