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Editors Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega) have assembled a volume which addresses the relationship between trauma and ethics, and moves one step further to engage with vulnerability studies in their relation to literature and literary form. It consists of an introduction and of twelve articles written by specialists from various European countries and includes an interview with US novelist Jayne Anne Philips, conducted by her translator into French, Marc Amfreville, addressing her latest novel, Quiet Dell, through the victimhood-vulnerability prism. The corpus of primary sources on which the volume is based draws on various literary backgrounds in English, from Britain to India, through the USA. The editors draw on material from the ethics of alterity, trauma studies and the ethics of vulnerability in line with the work of moral philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, as well as with a more recent and challenging tradition of continental thinkers, virtually unknown so far in the English-speaking world, represented by Guillaume Le Blanc, Nathalie Maillard, and Corinne Pelluchon, among others. Yet another related line of thought followed in the volume is that represented by feminist critics like Catriona McKenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds.
List of contents
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau
PART I: Loss of Affect and Victimization
1 And Yet: Figuring Global Trauma in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
Cathérine Bernard
2 "The Willful Child": Resignifying Vulnerability through Affective Attachments in Emma Donoghue’s Room
Maite Escudero
3 The Construction of Vulnerability and Monstrosity in Slipstream:Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
Merve Sarikaya-Sen
PART II: Gender, Class, Race and the Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability
4 Erasing Female Victimhood: The Debate over Trauma and Truth
Ángeles de la Concha
5 Vulnerable Ethics and Politics: Peter Ackroyd’s Rhetoric of Excess and Indirection in The Lambs of London
Susana Onega
6 Reviving Ghosts: The Reversibility of Victims and Vindicators in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger
Eileen Williams-Wanquet
7 A Dialectic of Trauma and Shame: The Politics of Dispossession in Gail Jones’s Black Mirror
María Pilar Royo-Grasa
PART III: The Politics of Visibility
8 The Humanism behind Jonathan Coe’s Narrative "patchwork[s] of … coincidences": Acting and Writing around Vulnerability
Laurent Mellet
9 The (In)visibility of Systemic Victimization: A Reading of Rupa Bajwa’s The Sari Shop
Angela Locatelli
10 Shifting Visibilities: The Politics of Trauma and Vulnerability in Neil Bartlett’s Skin Lane
Jean-Michel Ganteau
PART IV: History and the Archive
11 Hidden in Plain Sight: The Vulnerable Shapes of Lisa Appignanesi’s Holocaust Narratives
Maria Grazia Nicolosi
12 The Archive of a Missed Future: Vulnerability and the Poetics of Helplessness in Jayne Anne Philips’s Quiet Dell
Marc Amfreville
13 Sympathetic Haunting: An Interview with Jayne Anne Philips
Conducted by Marc Amfreville
Index
About the author
Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France)
Susana Onega is Professor of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza, (Spain)
Summary
Editors Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega) have assembled a volume which addresses the relationship between trauma and ethics, and moves one step further to engage with vulnerability studies in their relation to literature and literary form. It consists of an introduction and of twelve articles written by specialists from various European countries and includes an interview with US novelist Jayne Anne Philips, conducted by her translator into French, Marc Amfreville, addressing her latest novel, Quiet Dell, through the victimhood-vulnerability prism. The corpus of primary sources on which the volume is based draws on various literary backgrounds in English, from Britain to India, through the USA. The editors draw on material from the ethics of alterity, trauma studies and the ethics of vulnerability in line with the work of moral philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, as well as with a more recent and challenging tradition of continental thinkers, virtually unknown so far in the English-speaking world, represented by Guillaume Le Blanc, Nathalie Maillard, and Corinne Pelluchon, among others. Yet another related line of thought followed in the volume is that represented by feminist critics like Catriona McKenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds.
