Trauma and Racial Difference in Twentieth-century American Literature

Trauma and Racial Difference in Twentieth-century American Literature PDF Author: Lisa Woolfork
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Trauma and Racial Difference in Twentieth-century American Literature

Trauma and Racial Difference in Twentieth-century American Literature PDF Author: Lisa Woolfork
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description


Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison PDF Author: Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807138175
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In this first interdisciplinary study of all nine of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber investigates how the communal and personal trauma of slavery embedded in the bodies and minds of its victims lives on through successive generations of African Americans. Approaching trauma from several cutting-edge theoretical perspectives -- psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and cultural and social theories -- Schreiber analyzes the lasting effects of slavery as depicted in Morrison's work and considers the almost insurmountable task of recovering from trauma to gain subjectivity. With an innovative application of neuroscience to literary criticism, Schreiber explains how trauma, whether initiated by physical abuse, dehumanization, discrimination, exclusion, or abandonment, becomes embedded in both psychic and bodily circuits. Slavery and its legacy of cultural rejection create trauma on individual, familial, and community levels, and parents unwittingly transmit their trauma to their children through repetition of their bodily stored experiences. Concepts of "home" -- whether a physical place, community, or relationship -- are reconstructed through memory to provide a positive self and serve as a healing space for Morrison's characters. Remembering and retelling trauma within a supportive community enables trauma victims to move forward and attain a meaningful subjectivity and selfhood. Through careful analysis of each novel, Schreiber traces the success or failure of Morrison's characters to build or rebuild a cohesive self, starting with slavery and the initial postslavery generation, and continuing through the twentieth century, with a special focus on the effects of inherited trauma on children. When characters attempt to escape trauma through physical relocation, or to project their pain onto others through aggressive behavior or scapegoating, the development of selfhood falters. Only when trauma is confronted through verbalization and challenged with reparative images of home, can memories of a positive self overcome the pain of past experiences and cultural rejection. While the cultural trauma of slavery can never truly disappear, Schreiber argues that memories that reconstruct a positive self, whether created by people, relationships, a physical place, or a concept, help Morrison's characters to establish subjectivity. A groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Schreiber's book unites psychoanalytic, neurobiological, and social theories into a full and richly textured analysis of trauma and the possibility of healing in Morrison's novels.

Father–Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Father–Daughter Incest in Twentieth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Christine Grogan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611479681
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
The first major study to challenge the narrow definition of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by rereading six American literary texts, this book argues for the importance of literature in representing not just circumscribed, singular traumatic events, as Cathy Caruth argued in the late nineties, but for giving voice to chronic and cumulative, or complex, traumatic experiences. This interdisciplinary study traces the development of father–daughter incest narratives published in the last hundred years, from male-authored fiction to female-authored memoir, bringing new readings to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and the Dylan Farrow-Woody Allen case. This study builds on the work of those ushering in a second-wave of trauma theory, which has argued that the difficulty of speaking about a traumatic experience is not necessarily caused by neurobiological changes that prevent victims from recalling details. Rather, it’s from social and political repercussions. In other words, they argue that many who experience trauma aren’t unable to deliver accounts; they fear the results. There is a significant gender component to trauma, whose implications, along with those of race and class, have largely gone unexamined in the first-wave of trauma theory. Exploring two additional questions about articulating trauma, this book asks what happens when the voice of trauma is crying out from what Toni Morrison has called the “most delicate,” “most vulnerable” member of society: a female child; and, second, what happens when the trauma is not just a time-limit event but chronic and cumulative experiences. Some traumatic experiences, namely father–daughter incest, are culturally reduced to the untellable, and yet accounts of paternal incest are readily available in American literature. This book is written in part as a response to the psychological community which failed to include complex PTSD in the latest edition of the DSM (DSM-5), denying victims, many of whom are father–daughter incest survivors, the validation and recognition they deserve and leaving many misdiagnosed and thereby mistreated.

Trauma and Race

Trauma and Race PDF Author: Sheldon George
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781602587359
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
African American identity is racialized. And this racialized identity has animated and shaped political resistance to racism. Hidden, though, are the psychological implications of rooting identity in race, especially because American history is inseparable from the trauma of slavery. In Trauma and Race author Sheldon George begins with the fact that African American racial identity is shaped by factors both historical and psychical. Employing the work of Jacques Lacan, George demonstrates how slavery is a psychic event repeated through the agencies of racism and inscribed in racial identity itself. The trauma of this past confronts the psychic lack that African American racial identity both conceals and traumatically unveils for the African American subject. Trauma and Race investigates the vexed, ambivalent attachment of African Americans to their racial identity, exploring the ways in which such attachment is driven by traumatic, psychical urgencies that often compound or even exceed the political exigencies called forth by racism.

Not Even Past

Not Even Past PDF Author: Dorothy Stringer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823292226
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Not Even Past highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, "idian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is "not even past," narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail. Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works constitute not an expounded or avowed but an interstitial trauma theory, which finds its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Their works parallel important essays by psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era, including Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin, and their joint explication of relationships among psyche, history, and race offers important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today. Despite their analytic acuity, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also themselves carry the traumatic past forward into the future. Indeed, the two novelists' tragic depictions of a triumphant color line and the photographer's insistence on an idiom of black primitivism lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth century. Yet even in their very failure, three U.S. modernists tell us that it is not enough simply to exercise critical acuity on the marks of past violence. Reading, however masterly, cannot interrupt a history in the midst of repeating itself; it can only itself reiterate the disaster.

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma PDF Author: Eden Wales Freedman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827376
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or witnessing—trauma in order to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women and adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature. Eden Wales Freedman articulates a theory of reading (or dual-witnessing) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. She places these original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in African American literature. The volume also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes] PDF Author: Linda De Roche
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440853592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1563

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Book Description
This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Tyrone R. Simpson II
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113701489X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This book explores how six American writers have artistically responded to the racialization of U.S. frostbelt cities in the twentieth century. Using the critical tools of spatial theory, critical race theory, urban history and sociology, Simpson explains how these writers imagine the subjective response to the race-making power of space.

Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Racism and Xenophobia in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction PDF Author: Wisam Abughosh Chaleila
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000328228
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
"The Melting Pot," "The Land of The Free," "The Land of Opportunity." These tropes or nicknames apparently reflect the freedom and open-armed welcome that the United States of America offers. However, the chronicles of history do not complement that image. These historical happenings have not often been brought into the focus of Modernist literary criticism, though their existence in the record is clear. This book aims to discuss these chronicles, displaying in great detail the underpinnings and subtle references of racism and xenophobia embedded so deeply in both fictional and real personas, whether they are characters, writers, legislators, or the common people. In the main chapters, literary works are dissected so as to underline the intolerance hidden behind words of righteousness and blind trust, as if such is the norm. Though history is taught, it is not so thoroughly examined. To our misfortune, we naively think that bigoted ideas are not a thing we could become afflicted with. They are antiques from the past – yet they possessed many hundreds of people and they surround us still. Since we’ve experienced very little change, it seems discipline is necessary to truly attempt to be rid of these ideas.

The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook

The Twentieth-Century American Fiction Handbook PDF Author: Christopher MacGowan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405160233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION Accessibly structured with entries on important historical contexts, central issues, key texts and the major writers, this Handbook provides an engaging overview of twentieth-century American fiction. Featured writers range from Henry James and Theodore Dreiser to contemporary figures such as Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Pynchon, and Sherman Alexie, and analyses of key works include The Great Gatsby, Lolita, The Color Purple, and The Joy Luck Club, among others. Relevant contexts for these works, such as the impact of Hollywood, the expatriate scene in the 1920s, and the political unrest of the 1960s are also explored, and their importance discussed. This is a stimulating overview of twentieth-century American fiction, offering invaluable guidance and essential information for students and general readers.