Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories

Lisa Propst

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780228004042
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228005070
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Efforts to fight back against silencing are central to social justice movements and scholarly fields such as feminist and postcolonial studies. But claiming to give voice to people who have been silenced always risks appropriating those people's stories.

Lisa Propst argues that the British novelist and public intellectual Marina Warner offers some of the most provocative contemporary interventions into this dilemma. Tracing her writing from her early journalism to her novels, short stories, and studies of myths and fairy tales, Propst shows that in Warner's work, features such as stylized voices and narrative silences - tales that Warner's books hint at but never tell - question the authority of the writer to tell other people's stories. At the same time they demonstrate the power of literature to make new ethical connections between people, inviting readers to reflect on whom they are responsible to and how they are implicated in social systems that perpetuate silencing.

By exploring how to combat silencing through narrative without reproducing it, Marina Warner and the Ethics of Telling Silenced Stories takes up an issue crucial not just to literature and art but to journalists, policy makers, human rights activists, and all people striving to formulate their own responses to injustice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Stories of Silencing and the Dangers of Appropriation
• 1 Writing across Cultures: Multiple Viewpoints and Openness to Uncertainty in Warners’s Early Life and Vietnam Journalism
• 2 Role Models and Parallel Lives: Identification and Imagination in In a Dark Wood, The Skating Party, and The Lost Father
• 3 Unsettling Stories: Disruptions of Empathy in Indigo and The Leto Bundle
• 4 Hearing the Unsaid: An Ethics of Bearing Witness in Warner’s Short Fiction
• 5 Nervous Histories: Resistance to Scholarly Mastery in Warner’s Studies of Myths and Fairy Tales
• Coda: The Power and Limits of Narrative
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index