Contemporary Trauma Narratives Liminality and the Ethics of Form [Hardcover]

This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or liminal narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous, more neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers.

Building on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and hybridizations of forms, paying special attention to the way in which the texts fight the unrepresentability of trauma by performing rather than representing it. The ethicality or unethicality involved in this endeavor is assessed from the combined perspectives of the non-foundational, non-cognitive, discursive ethics of alterity inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, and the ethics of vulnerability. This approach makes Contemporary Trauma Narrativesan excellent resource for scholars of contemporary literature, trauma studies and literary theory.

Introduction Performing the Void: Liminality and the Ethics of Form in Contemporary Trauma Narratives Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega  Part 1: Ethics and Generic Hybridity  1.Learning from Fakes: Memoir, Confessional Ethics, and the Limits of Genre Leigh Gilmore  2. . . . with a foot in both worlds : The Liminal Ethics of Jenny Diskis Postmodern Fables Maria Grazia Nicolosi  3. Witnessing without Witnesses: Atwoods Oryx and Crake as Limit-Case of Fictional Testimony Marie-Luise Kohlke  4.  I dol#�