The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievability in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

Susana Onega, Jean-Michel Ganteau, Susana Onega, Jean-Michel Ganteau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032389769
• eBook ISBN: 9781000750263
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The working hypothesis of the book is that, since the 1990s, an increasing number of Anglophone fictions are responding to the new ethical and political demands arising out of the facts of war, exclusion, climate change, contagion, posthumanism and other central issues of our post-trauma age by adapting the conventions of traditional forms of expressing grievability, such as elegy, testimony or (pseudo-)autobiography. Situating themselves in the wake of Judith Butler's work on (un-)grievablability, the essays collected in this volume seek to cast new light on these issues by delving into the socio-cultural constructions of grievability and other types of vulnerabilities, invisibilities and inaudibilities linked with the neglect and/or abuse of non-normative individuals and submerged groups that have been framed as disposable, exploitable and/or unmournable by such determinant factors as sex, gender, ethnic origin, health, etc., thereby refining and displacing the category of subalternity associated with the poetics of postmodernism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievability in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction
• Part I The Presence of History
• Part II Grieving the Earth
• Part III Outcasts
• Part IV Contamination
• Part V After the Subject
• Index