Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature

Miriam Fernández-Santiago, Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández, Miriam Fernández-Santiago, Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000827989
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary representations of vulnerability may problematize its visibilization from an ethical and aesthetic perspective. Recent technological and scientific developments have accentuated human vulnerability in many and different ways at a cross-national, and even cross-species level. Disability, technological, and ecological vulnerabilities are new foci of interest that add up to gender, precarity and trauma, among others, as forms of vulnerability in this volume. The literary visualization of these vulnerabilities might help raise social awareness of one's own vulnerabilities as well as those of others so as to bring about global solidarity based on affinity and affect. However, the literary representation of forms of vulnerability might also deepen stigmatization phenomena and trivialize the spectacularization of vulnerability by blunting readers' affective response towards those products that strive to hold their attention and interest in an information-saturated, global entertainment market.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction: Current Literary Representations of Vulnerability. Ethical and Aesthetic Concerns
• 1 Precarity and the Global Dispossession of Indigeneity through Representations of Disability
• 2 Performing Ceremony: Healing, Empowering, Re-Writing History in Alexis P. Gumbs’ Dub (2020)
• 3 The Visibility of Embeddings: Materiality, Vulnerability, and Care in Cynan Jones’s The Long Dry (2006)
• 4 Pretty Dolls Don’t Play Dice: The Calculated Vulnerabilities of Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (2017)
• 5 Wolves, Bees, and Roaches: On the Nexus between Cultural Production and the Vulnerability of Humans and Non-Human Species
• 6 “The Ones We Love Are Enemies of the State”: Mourners and Trespassers in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017)
• 7 Mapping Contemporary Hell: Vulnerability, Social Invisibility, and Spectral Mourning in Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs (2010)
• 8 The Logics of Vulnerability: Challenging the Ungrievable Différance of the Other in Tabish Khair’s Just Another Jihadi Jane (2016)
• 9 Technological Vulnerability in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Don DeLillo’s The Silence (2020)
• 10 When Immortality Becomes a Burden: Transhuman Vulnerability and Self-Consciousness in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)
• 11 Vulnerability and Risk in Larissa Lai’s Critical Dystopias
• Index