How 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 remarkable volume explores the emotional, political, and aesthetic dimensions of testimonies to trauma as they translate private anguish into public space. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw have assembled a collection of essays that trace the legacy of the Holocaust and subsequent events that have shaped twentieth-century history and still haunt contemporary culture.
Extremities combines personal and scholarly approaches to a wide range of texts that bear witness to shocking and moving accounts of individual trauma: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Tatana Kellner's Holocaust art, Ruth Klüger's powerful memoir Still Alive, and Binjamin Wilkomirski's controversial narrative of concentration camp suffering Fragments. The book grapples with the cultural and social effects of historical crises, including the Montreal Massacre, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the medical catastrophes of HIV/AIDS and breast cancer.
Developing insights from autobiography, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and gender studies, the authors demonstrate that testimonies of troubling and taboo subjects do more than just add to the culture of confession–-they transform identities and help reimagine the boundaries of community. Extremities offers an original and timely interpretive guide to the growing field of trauma studies. The volume includes essays by Ross Chambers, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others.
Is there a plot against the life of letters today?!!!! A mysterious assailant has tied a nameless text to a railroad track near Boondock State University. While young untenured English professor Jane Marple enlists a group of odd and oddly rivalrous academicians to help her identify and save the text, a coalition of powerful conservatives begins to suspect and rally against a left-wing conspiracy. But all are foiled when the amnesiac text is abducted on the Euro-Centric Express, where Ms. Marple encounters a number of suspiciously eccentric theorists temporarily set loose from their usual haunts in Marxist, deconstructionist, new historicist, and postcolonial circles. You'll laugh with our heroine, you'll cry with her, but you'll never guess how--using the very latest technology and in the midst of sometimes sinister stage and screen celebrities--she brings the last of three thrilling episodes in the canon wars to an end at a WOW (Writers of the World) conference set in the heart of the Big Apple.
In this hilarious romp through the culture wars, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar send up everyone including, sometimes, themselves, while at the same time they speculate seriously on the future of literature and literacy in a society where both are increasingly endangered. The cast includes well-known critics, politicians, writers, pop stars, media personalities, and a juicy assortment of technocrats, CEOs, and other culture vultures. Any similarities you find between these characters and actual persons, living or dead, are probably glaring. So, hum the opening notes of Masterpiece Theatre as you sit back, relax, and consider (yes!) the fate of the printed word in Western civilization.
Masterpiece Theatre is the latest--and funniest--round in the culture wars. No member of Modern Language Association, lover of literature and literacy, cultural pundit, or talking head should be without a copy.
With a little help from Virginia Woolf, Susan Gubar contemplates startling transformations produced by the women's movement in recent decades. What advances have women made and what still needs to be done? Taking Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own as her guide, Gubar engages these questions by recounting one year in the life of an English professor.
A meditation on the teaching of literature and on the state of the humanities today, her chapters also provide a crash course on the challenges and changes in feminist intellectual history over the past several decades: the influence of post-structuralism and of critical race, postcolonial, and cultural studies scholarship; the stakes of queer theory and the institutionalization of women's studies; and the effects of globalism and bioengineering on conversations about gender, sex, and sexuality. Yet Rooms of Our Own eschews a scholarly approach. Instead, through narrative criticism it enlists a thoroughly contemporary cast of characters who tell us as much about the comedies and tragedies of campus life today as they do about the sometimes contentious but invariably liberating feminisms of our future.
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