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A brilliant, fiercely profound work of creative non-fiction in the vein of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. In this extraordinary book, Meera Atkinson explores the ways trauma reverberates over a lifetime, unearthing the traumatic roots of our social structures and our collective history. Using memoir as a touchstone, Atkinson contemplates the causes of trauma and the scars it leaves on modern society. She vibrantly captures her early life in 1970s and '80s Sydney and her self-reflection leads the reader on a journey that takes in neuroscience, pop psychology, feminist theory and much more. Searing in its truthfulness and beauty, Traumata deals with issues of our time &–intergenerational trauma, family violence, alcoholism, child abuse, patriarchy &– forging a path of fearless enquiry through the complexity of humanity.
The first decades of the twenty-first century have been beset by troubling social realities: coalition warfare, global terrorism and financial crisis, climate change, epidemics of family violence, violence toward women, addiction, neo-colonialism, continuing racial and religious conflict. While traumas involving large-scale or historical violence are widely represented in trauma theory, familial trauma is still largely considered a private matter, associated with personal failure. This book contributes to the emerging field of feminist trauma theory by bringing focus to works that contest this tendency, offering new understandings of the significance of the literary testimony and its relatio...
Traumatic Affect examines the intersection of trauma theory and affect theory, two areas of crucial relevance to contemporary thought. While both fields continue to offer insights into individual and collective experience, exploring their nexus offers timely and necessary critiques of film, literature, art, culture and politics. This collection of essays by established and emerging thinkers considers the dynamic relations within and between affect and trauma. Varied in style and approach, this volume asks how the relational subject conceived by affect theory might bring into question certain presuppositions common to trauma theory and how the ethical imperatives of trauma might require a ret...
From the NUMBER 1 bestselling author of LIFE AFTER LIFE, SHRINES OF GAIETY and NORMAL RULES DON'T APPLY On a peat and heather island off the west coast of Scotland, Effie and her mother Nora take refuge in the large mouldering house of their ancestors and tell each other stories. Nora, at first, recounts nothing that Effie really wants to hear, like who her father was - variously Jimmy, Jack, or Ernie. Effie tells of her life at college in Dundee, where she lives in a lethargic relationship with Bob, a student who never goes to lectures, seldom gets out of bed, and to whom the Klingons are as real as the French and the Germans (more real than the Luxemburgers). But strange things are happening. Why is Effie being followed? Why is everyone writing novels? Is someone killing the old people? And where is the mysterious yellow dog? 'Sends jolts of pleasure off the page...Kate Atkinson's funniest foray yet...it is a work of Dickensian or even Shakespearean plenty' SCOTSMAN 'A brilliant and profoundly original writer' DAILY TELEGRAPH
The magnificent novel by bestselling and award-winning Kate Atkinson: 'A masterpiece' - Telegraph; 'Pageturner' - Evening Standard; 'Wise, funny and paced like a thriller' Observer In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever. Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being...
The brilliant and profound second novel from the three-times Costa prizewinner and number one bestseller Kate Atkinson. 'Vivid, richly imaginative, hilarious and frightening by turns' Observer Once it had been the great forest of Lythe. And here, in the beginning, lived the Fairfaxes, grandly, at Fairfax Manor. But over the centuries the forest had been destroyed, replaced by Streets of Trees. The Fairfaxes have dwindled too; now they live in 'Arden' at the end of Hawthorne Close and are hardly a family at all. But Isobel Fairfax, who drops into pockets of time and out again, knows about the past. She is sixteen and waiting for the return of her mother - the thin, dangerous Eliza with her scent of nicotine, Arpège and sex, whose disappearance is part of the mystery that still remains at the heart of the forest.
On a beautiful summer day, crowds lined up outside a theater witness a sudden act of extreme road rage: a tap on a fender triggers a nearly homicidal attack. Jackson Brodie, ex-cop, ex-private detective, new millionaire, is among the bystanders. The event thrusts Jackson into the orbit of the wife of an unscrupulous real estate tycoon, a washed-up comedian, a successful crime novelist, a mysterious Russian woman, and a female police detective. Each of them hiding a secret, each looking for love or money or redemption or escape, they all play a role in driving Jackson out of retirement and into the middle of several mysteries that intersect in one sinister scheme. Kate Atkinson "writes such fluid, sparkling prose that an ingenious plot almost seems too much to ask, but we get it anyway," writes Laura Miller for Salon. With a keen eye for the excesses of modern life, a warm understanding of the frailties of the human heart, and a genius for plots that turn and twist, Atkinson has written a novel that delights and surprises from the first page to the last.
When Katerina Bryant suddenly began experiencing chronic seizures, she was plunged into a foreign world of doctors and psychiatrists, who understood her condition as little as she did. Reacting the only way she knew how, she immersed herself in books, reading her way through her own complicated diagnosis and finding a community of women who shared similar experiences. In the tradition of Siri Hustvedt's The Shaking Woman, Bryant blends memoir with literary and historical analysis to explore women's medical treatment. Hysteria retells the stories of silenced women, from the 'Queen of Hysterics' Blanche Wittmann to Mary Glover's illness termed 'hysterica passio' a panic attack caused by the mo...
The first decades of the twenty-first century have been beset by troubling social realities: coalition warfare, global terrorism and financial crisis, climate change, epidemics of family violence, violence toward women, addiction, neo-colonialism, continuing racial and religious conflict. While traumas involving large-scale or historical violence are widely represented in trauma theory, familial trauma is still largely considered a private matter, associated with personal failure. This book contributes to the emerging field of feminist trauma theory by bringing focus to works that contest this tendency, offering new understandings of the significance of the literary testimony and its relatio...
A Theology of Traumatic Affect offers theological tools, language, and framework to victims/survivors of trauma and their communities. Seen through the lens of affect theory, the social dimensions of trauma emerge even for individual trauma. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Alice Kim argues that due to interconnectedness of individuals, a communal effort is necessary for trauma work. Living in a different world as imagined by public imagination is possible now with collective planetary engagement of all creatures participating in co-creation.