Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature

Description

This volume addresses the construction and artistic representation of traumatic memories in the contemporary Western world from a variety of inter- and trans-disciplinarity critical approaches and perspectives, ranging from the cultural, political, historical, and ideological to the ethical and aesthetic, and distinguishing between individual, collective, and cultural traumas. The chapters introduce complementary concepts from diverse thinkers including Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Abraham and Torok, and Joyce Carol Oates; they also draw from fields of study such as Memory Studies, Theory of Affects, Narrative and Genre Theory, and Cultural Studies. Traumatic Memory and the Political, Economic, and Transhistorical Functions of Literature addresses trauma as a culturally embedded phenomenon and deconstructs the idea of trauma as universal, transhistorical, and abstract. Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv Introduction (Susana Onega, Constanza del Río, Maite Escudero-Alías)....Pages 1-17 Front Matter ....Pages 19-19 Memory and Appropriation: Remembering Dante in Germany During the Sexcentenary of 1921 (Martin Elsky)....Pages 21-45 On Poetic Violence: W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and César Vallejo’s “Vusco volvvver de golpe el golpe” (David Lloyd)....Pages 47-69 Front Matter ....Pages 71-71 Holocaust Trauma Between the National and the Transnational: Reflections on History’s “Broken Mirror” (Larissa Allwork)....Pages 73-100 Wandering Memory, Wandering Jews: Generic Hybridity and the Construction of Jewish Memory in Linda Grant’s Works (Silvia Pellicer-Ortín)....Pages 101-125 “Fighting Trauma”: Silencing the Past in Alan Scott Haft’s Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano (Rudolf Freiburg)....Pages 127-151 Front Matter ....Pages 153-153 Medieval Romance After HIV and AIDS: The Aesthetics of Innocence and Naïveté and the Postmodern Novel (Justin Paul Brumit)....Pages 155-180 Remembrance Between Act and Event: Anne Enright’s The Gathering (Jean-Michel Ganteau)....Pages 181-200 Class Trauma, Shame and Spectrality in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (Susana Onega)....Pages 201-225 Front Matter ....Pages 227-227 On Exile, Memory and Food: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food (Anna Maria Tomczak)....Pages 229-249 Self-Representation and the (Im)Possibility of Remembering in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Mr. Potter (Bárbara Arizti)....Pages 251-277 Trauma, Screen Memories, Safe Spaces and Productive Melancholia in Toni Morrison’s Home (Katrina Harack, Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz)....Pages 279-310 Conclusion (Constanza del Río, Susana Onega, Maite Escudero-Alías)....Pages 311-316 Back Matter ....Pages 317-331