1st Edition

Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction

Edited By Jean-Michel Ganteau, Susana Onega Copyright 2017
    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    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

    Biography

     

    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)