Narrating violence, constructing collective identities
Subtitle: to witness these wrongs unspeakable
By: Giti Chandra.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 177
ISBN-13: 9780230219625
Subjects: Morrison, Toni; Morrison, Toni; Kingston, Maxine Hong; Tan, Amy; Allende, Isabel; American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism; Violence in literature; Group identity in literature; Women in literature; Chilean literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism
Description: "The study is focused around widely-read novels written by women authors over the last 30 or so years. Each of these novels revisits sites of extreme or intense violence in the lives both of its protagonists and of the collective to which they belong in the process of defining the identity of that collective. Each of these novels also deals with a different historical event of violence: Toni Morrison's Beloved (slavery) and Sula (World War I), Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (World War II), Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (feudal China), and Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits (State Terrorism). The book reads texts as disparate as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and the Bible to create a theoretical framework for the constructions of individual and collective identities that are deeply embedded in these narratives of violence. Each text interrogates the nature of the collective formed. In form and narrative strategies these texts deploy non-real tropes and elements, using these to index realities in registers other than the empirical. figure forth realities that strain at the limits of human comprehension and endurance and, finally, to gesture towards future realities"--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The mystery of violence; title: To witness these wrongs unspeakable: the metaphorical, the material and the violenced body; title: The poison in the womb: dis/placing the violenced body in Toni Morrison's; title: Beloved; title: Narrating collectivity from violence: the case of slavery and World War I in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Sula; title: The voice and the book: collectivity, orality and novelistic discourse; title: Immigration and identity: the case of feudalism and the second world war in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club; title: An invisible country, a true Chile: the body of evidence in Isabel Allende's House of Spirits.