Studies in the Novel articles from March 2008

Studies in the Novel archives from March 2008

Introduction: postcolonial trauma novels.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... Trauma studies, an area of cultural investigation that came to prominence in the early-to-mid-1990s, prides itself on its explicit commitment to ethics, which sets it apart from the poststructuralist criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s in...

Journeying through hell: Wole Soyinka, trauma, and postcolonial Nigeria.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... In The Harmony of Illusions, Allan Young questioned whether the category of trauma, which first emerged during the nineteenth century, could be referred back through historical time and identified in, for example, Pepys's diary, Shakespeare's...

Who speaks? Who listens?: The problem of address in two Nigerian trauma novels.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders' army with terror. He slashes...

The curse of constant remembrance: the belated trauma of the slave trade in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... In the early days our forebears sold their kinsmen into slavery for minor items such as beads, mirrors, alcohol, and tobacco. These days, the tune is the same, only the articles have changed into cars, transistor radios, and bank accounts....

"You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen": holocaust testimony and contemporary African trauma literature.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... The aim of this article is to explore possible correlations between literature of the Holocaust, widely defined, and recent works about genocide, mass-murder, and atrocity in Africa. It will focus on a number of texts that concern both the...

Mortgaged futures: trauma, subjectivity, and the legacies of colonialism in Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... Because it... den[ies] the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: "In reality, who am I?" Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth I was... being...

"This text deletes itself": traumatic memory and space-time in Zoe Wicomb's David's Story.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... The group of cultural and literary theorists whom I would loosely categorize as practitioners of "trauma theory"--including, most notably, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Dominick LaCapra--share several assumptions. Their ideas...

The past in the present: personal and collective trauma in Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... One might argue that narratives in fiction may... involve truth claims on a structural or general level by providing insight into phenomena such as slavery and the Holocaust, by offering a reading of a process or period, or by giving an at...

The heterotopic spaces of postcolonial trauma in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... Studying in Guy's Hospital in London where she is training to be a forensic scientist, Anil Tissera, the protagonist of Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, discovers a new word that sounds strangely familiar though she has never heard it before....

"You your best thing, Sethe": trauma's narcissism.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... Some time ago, in reading one of the founding texts of trauma studies, Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience, I proposed that her notion of entanglement offers a model for understanding how one historical trauma is implicated in another (see...

Linking legacies of loss: traumatic histories and cross-cultural empathy in Caryl Phillips's higher ground and the nature of blood.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... The work of the British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips provides a notable literary instantiation of Cathy Caruth's claim that "trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures" ("Trauma" 11), a claim that, though central to trauma...

The trans/historicity of trauma in Jeannette Armstrong's Slash and Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer.(d)(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... We're carrying a pain that is 400 years old. Alanis Obomsawin The ongoing domestic colonization of North America has a specifically "traumatic" impact on the Native peoples of this land, but what is the "event" or referent to which...

Decolonizing trauma studies: a response.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... Andre Schwarz-Bart's slim novel A Woman Named Solitude (La mulatresse Solitude, 1972) tells an epic tale of trans-Atlantic slavery with implications for contemporary trauma studies. Over the course of Solitude, the descendants of a pastoral...