The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma

Dr Meera Atkinson (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

240 Seiten

2017
Bloomsbury Academic USA (Verlag)
978-1-5013-3087-2 (ISBN)

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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 relationship to broader society.

The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma adopts an interdisciplinary approach in examining how the literary testimony of familial transgenerational trauma, with its affective and relational contagion, illuminates transmissive cycles of trauma that have consequences across cultures and generations. It offers bold and insightful readings of works that explore those consequences in story—Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Hélène Cixous's Hyperdream (2009), Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1992), Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy (1999), and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), concluding that such testimony constitutes a fundamentally feminist experiment and encounter. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma challenges the casting of familial trauma in ahistorical terms, and affirms both trauma and writing as social forces of political import.

Meera Atkinson is Lecturer in English Literature at New York University Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Traumata (2018) and co-editor, with Michael Richardson, of Traumatic Affect (2013). Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published in Salon.com, Best Australian Poems 2010, and Best Australian Stories 2007 among other publications.

Foreword
Gregory J. Seigworth (Millersville University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Trauma, Affect, and Testimonies of Transmission
1. L’écriture Féminine and the Strange Body
2. The Ethics of Writing (Through) a History of Familial Trauma
3. Hauntology and the Spooked Text
4. Family Snapshots to Big Picture: Cyclical Haunting
5. Provocations Beyond the Human
Conclusion: Becoming Trans-formed

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	12.08.2017
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	490 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
ISBN-10	1-5013-3087-X / 150133087X
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-3087-2 / 9781501330872
Zustand	Neuware