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| "Foreign bodies" : Trauma, corporeality, and textuality in contemporary American culture (Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Dorothy Allison, Sally Mann) | |||
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| Author | Di Prete, Laura | ||
| Broad Subject |
Literature | ||
| Summary | This study originates as an inquiry into psychic trauma, a phenomenon that one cannot locate exclusively within the domain of the cultural/historical or the private and personal, but rather at the crossroads between these realms. My main concern is to investigate the relation between the notion of trauma and possible forms of representation within the necessary constraints that traumatic experience itself imposes. Many influential trauma theorists have focused on the notion of textual "voice" in their search for appropriate, effective, and adequate representational modes. Yet I intend to argue that any theoretical reflection on the ways of narrating trauma---including debates on representational distance, objectivity, and faithfulness to the psychic dynamics at work---cannot exclude corporeality as one of the central figures of this telling. In a number of literary and visual texts, I detect a mode of telling that acknowledges an indissoluble bond between voice and body, trauma and corporeality. Indeed, writing trauma means in a number of texts---which I call "corporeal" trauma narratives---speaking and writing the body, and returning to the body as a medium of self-expression and---crucially---textual working through. Coming from different traditions, with different purposes and intentions, and in different forms, Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Don DeLillo's The Body Artist (2001), Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), and the photographs of Sally Mann's Immediate Family (1992) grapple with phenomena that resist definition in terms of normal parameters of causality, temporality and location, by making of the body their central figure. By conceptually reading these narratives against the Freudian metaphor for traumatic memory---that of a quasi-palpable "foreign body"---I argue that these texts stage possible mourning in their ability to turn this "foreign body" into something familiar, recognizable, and owned. In perceptively transforming, relocating, and subverting the Freudian metaphor, these texts bear witness to traumatic experience and articulate the complicated process from traumatic memory to conscious memory. Thus, they dramatize the psychic journey of the victim's defamiliarization and estrangement from his or her body---a body become "foreign"---by attending not only to verbal signs but also to that non-verbal, sensorial, and perceptual experience that remains locked within the body. | ||
| Language | English | ||
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| Available at : | |||
| Click to view the dissertation via Digital dissertation consortium | |||
| Authorized remote access from |
Current HKU staff and students (HKUVPN access) Current HKU staff and students (EZproxy access) HKU SPACE | ||
| Format | E-theses | ||
| Location | Web Mounted | ||