Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T12:47:12.220Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Introduction. Contemporary Literature in Times of Crisis and Vulnerability: Trauma, Demise of Sovereignty and Interconnectedness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2020

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín  and
Merve Sarikaya-Şen
Silvia Pellicer-Ortín
Affiliation:
Dpto. Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Educación, Universidad de Zaragoza, C/Pedro Cerbuna, 12. 50009 Zaragoza, Spain. Email: spellice@unizar.es
Merve Sarikaya-Şen
Affiliation:
Başkent Üniversitesi Bağlıca Kampüsü, Fatih Sultan Mahallesi, Eskişehir Yolu 18.km, Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi, Amerikan Kültürü ve Edebiyatı Bölümü, Etimesgut, Ankara, Turkey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been dominated by multifarious crises that have given way to individual and collective wounds resulting from environmental disasters, exile and migratory movements, war, terrorism, radicalism and other disturbing historical episodes. Our main contention is that trauma and/or excessive exposure to vulnerable situations can be relieved thanks to diverse narrative practices. Accordingly, we explore the field of Trauma Studies since its emergence to its current evolution towards the vulnerability paradigm, examining the different meanings of vulnerability not only from the perspective of the life sciences but also from the social sciences and its application to the humanities. Then, we move on to the notion of resilience and how it can help us articulate and/or move beyond trauma and vulnerability. In keeping with this, considering the ethical and political relationality between the self and other, we highlight one’s tendency to be affected by the other’s wounds and vulnerability as well as the inevitability of interdependency and interconnectedness between people and non-human entities. Thus, we explore the role of literature in giving voice to the voiceless and to unheard experiences of suffering as well as in representing the demise of the sovereign self and the rise of human and non-human interconnectedness after being exposed to traumatic or disastrous events, as represented in contemporary literatures in English.

Type
Articles
Information
European Review , Volume 29 , Issue 3: Literature in Times of Crisis and Vulnerability , June 2021 , pp. 315 - 332
Copyright
© 2020 Academia Europaea

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

American Psychiatric Association (1980) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. DSM-III, 3rd edn. Washington: American Psychiatric Association.Google Scholar
Barry, S (2006) A Long Long Way. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Berger, J (1992 [1989]) Miners. Exhibition catalogue. In Keeping a Rendezvous. London: Vintage, p. 9.Google Scholar
Berlant, L (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bhabha, H (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bloom, SL (2010) Bridging the black hole of trauma: the evolutionary significance of the arts. Psychotherapy and Politics International 8(3), 198–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, J (2006) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Butler, J and Athanasiou, A (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Caruth, C (ed.) (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Castles, S and Miller, MJ (2003) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Coetzee, JM (1999) Disgrace. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Cyrulnik, B (2009) Resilience: how your inner strength can set you free from the past. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
DeLillo, D (2007) Falling Man. New York: Scribner.Google Scholar
Dijker, AJM (2014) A theory of vulnerability-based morality. Emotion Review 6(2), 175–183. doi: 10.1177/1754073913514120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Early, E (1993) The Raven’s Return: The Influence of Psychological Trauma on Individuals and Culture. Illinois: Chiron Publications.Google Scholar
Farrell, K (1998) Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Fassin, D and Rechtman, R (2009) The Empire of Trauma: An Enquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Felman, S and Dori Laub, MD (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fine, ES (1998) The absent memory: the act of writing in Post-Holocaust French literature. In Lang, B (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust. New York and London: Holmes & Meier, pp. 27–41.Google Scholar
Forché, C (1993) Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company.Google Scholar
Forna, A (2018) Happiness. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Freud, S (2001 [1914]) Remembering, repeating and working through. In Strachey, J, Freud, A, Strachey, A and Tyson, A (eds and trans), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1911–1913). Vol. 12. London, Vintage, pp. 145–156.Google Scholar
Freud, S and Breuer, J (1991 [1893]) On the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena: preliminary communication. In Strachey, J and Strachey, A (eds and trans), Studies on Hysteria. London: Penguin, pp. 53–69.Google Scholar
Ganteau, JM (2015) The Aesthetics and Ethics of Vulnerability: Contemporary British Fiction. New York and London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ganteau, JM (2017) The powers of exposure: risk and vulnerability in contemporary British fiction. Textual Practice 31(3), 443–455. doi: 10.1080/0950236X.2017.129489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ganteau, JM and Onega, S (eds) (2017) Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction. New York and Oxford: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ganteau, JM and Onega, S (eds) (2013) Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature. New York and London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilson, EC (2014) The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hall, S (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage and Open University.Google Scholar
Hall, S (2003) Who needs identity? In Hall, S and De Hay, P (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, pp. 1–17.Google Scholar
Hartman, GH (1996) The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Hartman, GH (2003) Trauma within the limits of literature. European Journal of English Studies 7(3), 257–274.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heilman, A and Llewellyn, M (eds) (2007) Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henke, SA (1998) Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Herman, JL (2001 [1992]). Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Pandora.Google Scholar
Janet, P (1901) The Mental State of Hystericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata and Mental Accidents. Rollin Corson C. (trans.). New York and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.Google Scholar
Jung, CG (1990 [1959]). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. The Collected Works of Carl Jung, vol. 9.1. Fordham, M and Adler, G (eds), Hull, RC and Read, H (trans). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kellermann, N (2001) The long-term psychological effects and treatment of Holocaust trauma. Journal of Loss and Trauma 6, 197–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaCapra, D (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Laub, D and Podell, D (1995) Art and trauma. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 76(5), 991–1005.Google ScholarPubMed
Levinas, E (1998) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, J (2018) Foreword. Disturbing transitions: critical inner landscapes of migration. In Pellicer-Ortín, S and Tofantšuk, J (eds), Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-day Transnational Diasporic Writing. London and New York: Routledge, pp. xvii–xx.Google Scholar
Luckhurst, R (2008) The Trauma Question. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mackenzie, C, Rogers, W and Dodds, S (eds) (2014) Introduction: what is vulnerability, and why does it matter for moral theory? In Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–29.Google Scholar
Merriam-Webster (2019) Online Edition. Available at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resilience (accessed 4 May 2019).Google Scholar
Moyers, BD (2014) Martha Nussbaum interview. Prometheus Unbound. Available at: https://delphinius56.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/martha-nussbaum-interview-by-bill-moyers/ (accessed 28 December 2016).Google Scholar
Nelson, LH (2001) Damages Identities, Narrative Repair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Norris, FH (2006) Disaster research methods: past progress and future directions. Journal of Traumatic Stress 19(2), 173–184.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nussbaum, M (2001 [1986]) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onega, S (2014) The notion of paradigm shift and the roles of science and literature in the interpretation of reality. European Review 22, 491–503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onega, S and Ganteau, JM (2011) Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onega, S and Ganteau, JM (2017) Introduction. In Ganteau, JM and Onega, S (eds), Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction. New York and Oxon: Routledge, pp. 1–18.Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary (2015) Online edition. Available at: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/224872?redirectedFrom=vulnerable#eid (accessed 25 March 2015).Google Scholar
Parekh, S (2016) Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement. London and New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pellicer-Ortín, S (2014) Separatedness and connectedness: generational trauma and the ethical impulse in Anne Karpf’s limit-case autobiography The War After: Living with the Holocaust. In Ganteau, JM and Onega, S (eds), Limit-case Trauma Narratives. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 293–320.Google Scholar
Pellicer-Ortín, S and Tofantšuk, J (2018) Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-day Transnational Diasporic Writing. London and New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plumwood, V (2002) Environmental Culture. The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rohan, Z (2010) The Small Book. Berfordshire: Bright Pen.Google Scholar
Rothberg, M (2013) Preface: beyond Tancred and Clorinda – trauma studies for subjects. In Buelens, G, Durrant, S and Eaglestone, R (eds), The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, pp. xi–xviii, xvii.Google Scholar
Said, E (1994) Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.Google Scholar
Sartre, JP (2002 [1947]). What is Literature? Frechtman B (trans). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sicher, E (2005) The Holocaust Novel. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
van der Kolk, BA and McFarlane, A (2007a) A general approach to treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. In Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 417–440.Google Scholar
van der Kolk, BA and McFarlane, A (2007b) A general approach to treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. In Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 3–23.Google Scholar
Ward, J (2011) Salvage the Bones. New York: Bloomsbury Press.Google Scholar
Zarowsky, C, Haddad, S and Nguyen, VK (2013) Introduction: beyond ‘vulnerable groups’: contexts and dynamics of vulnerability. Global Health Promotion 20(1), 3–9. doi: 10.1177/1757975912470062 CrossRefGoogle Scholar