Description
Book SynopsisHow do we come to terms with what can't be forgotten? How do we bear witness to extreme experiences that challenge the limits of language? This volume explores the emotional, political, and aesthetic dimensions of testimonies to trauma as they translate private anguish into public space.
Trade Review"A powerful contribution to the understanding of trauma through the primary lens of autobiography and memoir. . . .This impressive volume offers not only a theoretical vocabulary rich in its suggestiveness–-orphaned memory and foster-writing, writing wrong and writing pain, communities of risk and moral hospitality, traumatic realism and traumatic experience as citation, witnessing by adoption and feminist postmemory–-it also holds fast to the hope of community fostered on common grounds."--Kathleen Woodward, director of the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington
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Extremities offers fresh perspectives on a subject of urgent public concern: the experience of trauma in our lives and the problems it poses for those who write and read it."--Paul John Eakin, author of
How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves "This collection beautifully answers the demand for an ethical rhetoric in the rapidly proliferating field of trauma studies. Neither exploiting nor titillating, Extremities seriously and sensitively explores the devastating wounds to our private and public worlds, their consequences, and our potential for recuperation."--Claire Kahane, author of
Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking WomanTable of ContentsIntroduction : extremities / Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw -- Consuming trauma, or, The pleasures of merely circulating / Patricia Yaeger -- Between the extreme and the everyday : Ruth Kliger's traumatic realism / Michael Rothberg -- Marked by memory : feminist reflections on trauma and transmission / Marianne Hirsch -- Orphaned memories, foster-writing, phantom pain : the fragments affair / Ross Chambers -- Prosopopoeia and holocaust poetry in English : the case of Sylvia Plath / Susan Gubar -- Holocaust testimony, national memory / Orly Lubin -- Unbearable witness : toward a politics of listening / Wendy Hui Kyong Chun -- Testimony and the subjects of aids memoirs / Jason Tougaw -- Off my chest / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick -- Memory stains : Annie Ernaux's shame / Nancy K. Miller -- After Lot's daughters : Kathryn Harrison and the making of memory / Laura Frost -- The aryan boy / Wayne Koestenbaum -- A palinode on photography and the transsexual real / Jay Prosser -- Writing wrong / Sandra M. Gilbert.
