Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-032-13031-6
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 202 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 454 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary representations of vulnerability may problematize its visibilization from an ethical and aesthetic perspective. Recent technological and scientific developments have accentuated human vulnerability in many and different ways at a cross-national, and even cross-species level. Disability, technological, and ecological vulnerabilities are new foci of interest that add up to gender, precarity and trauma, among others, as forms of vulnerability in this volume. The literary visualization of these vulnerabilities might help raise social awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities as well as those of others so as to bring about global solidarity based on affinity and affect. However, the literary representation of forms of vulnerability might also deepen stigmatization phenomena and trivialize the spectacularization of vulnerability by blunting readers’ affective response towards those products that strive to hold their attention and interest in an information-saturated, global entertainment market.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fernández-Santiago, Miriam

Gámez-Fernández, Cristina M.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Tables

List of Contributors

Preface by Janet Wilson

Introduction

Current Literary Representations of Vulnerability. Ethical and Aesthetic Concerns

Miriam Fernández-Santiago and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández

Chapter 1

Precarity and the Global Dispossession of Indigeneity through Representations of Disability

David T. Mitchel and Sharon L. Snyder

Chapter 2

Performing Ceremony: Healing, Empowering, Re-Writing History in Alexis P. Gumbs’ Dub (2020)

Esther Sánchez-Pardo

Chapter 3

The Visibility of Embeddings: Materiality, Vulnerability and Care in Cynan Jones’s The Long Dry (2006)

Jean-Michel Ganteau

Chapter 4

Pretty Dolls Don’t Play Dice: The Calculated Vulnerabilities of Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (2017)

Miriam Fernández-Santiago

Chapter 5

Wolves, Bees, and Roaches: On the Nexus between Cultural Production and the Vulnerability of Humans and Non-Human Species

Peter Arnds

Chapter 6

"The ones we love are enemies of the state": Mourners and Trespassers in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017)

Carolina Sánchez-Palencia

Chapter 7

Mapping Contemporary Hell: Vulnerability, Social Invisibility and Spectral Mourning in Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010)

Susana Onega

Chapter 8

The Logics of Vulnerability: Challenging the Ungrievable Diffeìrance of the Other in Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane (2014)

Cristina M. Gaìmez-Fernández

Chapter 9

Technological Vulnerability in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Don DeLillo’s The Silence (2020)

Sonia Baelo-Allué

Chapter 10

When Immortality Becomes a Burden: Transhuman Vulnerability and Self-consciousness in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)

Francisco Collado-Rodríguez

Chapter 11

Vulnerability and Risk in Larissa Lai’s Critical Dystopias

Mónica Calvo-Pascual

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Miriam Fernández-Santiago is Head of the English Department at the University of Granada (Spain), where she teaches courses on Literatures and Cultures in English at graduate and undergraduate level. Her current research interests focus on contemporary literature in English, critical posthumanism, vulnerability and disability studies.

Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández is a Senior Lecturer of English in the Department of English and German at the University of Córdoba (Spain) and a founding member of the Challenging Precarity network. With Leonor María Martínez-Serrano, she has recently co-edited Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-than-human World (Brill, 2021).