Introduction: The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievability in Contemporary Anglophone fiction

• Autores: Susana Onega Jaén, Jean-Michel Ganteau
• Localización: The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievality in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction / coord. por Susana Onega Jaén, Jean-Michel Ganteau, 2023, ISBN 978-1-03-238976-9, págs. 1-11
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Literature has traditionally been concerned with the expression of grievability through such forms as elegy, testimony or (pseudo-)autobiography. Such genres provide means to perform mourning or, conversely, postulate an ethics of melancholia through continuing attachment to the departed. In our post-trauma age, this traditional function of literature has brought to the fore such aspects of grievability as the influence of race, class, gender and/or sexual orientation in the determination of the grievability or ungrievability of the human beings exposed to individual or collective violence. Thus, some fictions delve into the lives of those considered ungrievable and are submitted to invisibility and/or illicit dead, while in perpetrator trauma fictions it is the perpetrators themselves whose refusal or impossibility to acknowledge the harm done to others under warfare conditions fosters a relation of spectrality that transforms the unfairly killed into ghosts who cannot be laid down to rest. In the wake of Judith Butler’s work on (un-)grievable groups, this book addresses the ways in which fiction in English since the 1990s operates in its singularity to delve into the socio-cultural construction of grievability, thereby refining and displacing the more traditional categories of subalternity, inaudibility and invisibility associated with the poetics of postmodernism.