Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma

Description

Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma interrogates the relationship between the literary representation of postcolonial trauma and the embodied experience of reading. As the conditions from which postcolonial literatures have emerged require a break from “proper” ways to represent trauma, postcolonial writers expand and complicate the practice of reading itself. Though postcolonial literature’s capacity to represent trauma has received considerable scrutiny in recent years, Postcolonial Parabola is innovative in its consideration of the postcolonial text as a literary object. Working within a phenomenological framework that ties together disparate postcolonial periods, Jay Rajiva explores how narrative structure shapes the experience of reading the postcolonial literatures of South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He argues that these texts enmesh the reader in an asymptotic tactility: though readers might approach the disclosure of trauma, they cannot arrive at it. Awareness of the asymptotic nature of reading such works is crucial to a meaningful, ethical engagement with literary representations of postcolonial trauma Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Postcolonial Comparison 1 Excess and Tactility: Toward Interpretation as Vexed Contact Metaphor and phenomenology 2 Transfixion and Subversion: The Unexpected Endings of J. Devi and Coetzee Collective violence and South Asia Apartheid and the zero ending 3 Seduction and Substitution: Behr, Sidhwa, and the Child Narrator Apartheid, aphorism, and vocal overlay A child’s language of Partition 4 Motion and Stillness: Surface as Depth in Dangor and Ondaatje The scandal of return Vexed cognition Syncretism and surface The seen and areality Conclusion: Postcolonial Relation Notes Introduction: Postcolonial Comparison Chapter 1 Excess and Tactility Chapter 2 Transfixion and Subversion Chapter 3 Seduction and Substitution Chapter 4 Motion and Stillness Conclusion: Postcolonial Relation References Index