Terrorizing Images: Trauma and Ekphrasis in Contemporary Literature 16

This book combines two focal points: trauma and ekphrasis. It responds to the recognition of how terrorizing images permeate the public sphere in connection with traumatic experiences and conflicts and emphasizes the ways in which such images are described and interpreted by words. Contributors analyze the use of verbally represented images in a variety of literary texts, written in several different languages.

It is broadly accepted that "terrorizing" images are often instrumentalized in periods of conflict to serve political interests. This volume proposes that paying attention to how images of trauma and conflict are described in literary texts, i.e. to the rhetorical practice known as "ekphrasis", is crucial to our understanding of how such images work. The volume's contributors discuss verbal images of trauma and terror in literary texts both from a contemporary perspective and as historical artefacts in order to illuminate the many different functions of ekphrasis in literature. The articles in this volume reflect the vast developments in the field of trauma studies since the 1990s, a field that has recently broadened to include genres beyond the memoir and testimony and that lends itself well to new postcolonial, feminist, and multimedia approaches. By expanding the scholarly understanding of how images of trauma are described, interpreted, and acted out in literary texts, this collected volume makes a significant contribution to both trauma and memory studies, as well as more broadly to cultural studies.

9783110693959 9783110693959 Table of Contents Introduction: Encounters between Trauma and Ekphrasis, Words and Images De te fabula narratur! Violence and Representation in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance What Does It Mean To Be Human? Speculative Ekphrasis and Anthropocene Trauma in Don DeLillo’s Zero K The Ordinariness of Trauma: Reconstructing Intertextuality as an Aesthetics of Trauma Terrorizing Images and Traumatic Anticipation in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours Phantomogenic Ekphrasis: Traumatizing Images in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man Reenacting Rape in Édouard Louis’s History of Violence Empathic Vision? War Photography, Ekphrasis, and Memory in Bosnian War Literature Remedial Intermediality: Ekphrasis in Sinéad Morrissey’s “The Doctors” Traumatizing Images of Belfast in Mary Costello’s Novel Titanic Town Ekphrasis and the Holocaust: Traumatic Images in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones White Oblivion: Antarctica and the Suspension of Trauma Contributors Index Un Homme Vit Cloîtré Dans Une Bibliothèque Insolite Qui Accueille Jour Et Nuit Des Manuscrits Refusés Par Les éditeurs. Un Jour, Une Femme Sublime Vient Lui Confier Son Livre. Elle Raconte L'histoire De Son Corps, Cette Horrible Chose Qu'elle Ne Supporte Plus. Entre Le Bibliothécaire Farfelu Et Cette étrange Créature, Une Histoire D'amour Est Née, Et Les Ennuis Commencent.