1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910798352103321

Autore

Richardson Michael <1980- , >

Titolo

Gestures of testimony : torture, trauma, and affect in literature / / Michael Richardson

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Bloomsbury Academic, , 2016

ISBN

1-5013-1581-1

1-5013-1583-8

1-5013-1582-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (231 p.)

Classificazione

LIT000000LIT004020LIT006000

Disciplina

809/.933552

Soggetti

Affect (Psychology) in literature

Affect (Psychology) in motion pictures

Literature, Modern - History and criticism

Motion pictures - Social aspects

Psychic trauma in literature

Psychic trauma in motion pictures

Torture in literature

Torture in motion pictures

Torture - Moral and ethical aspects

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Gesturing the Unrepresentable -- Chapter 1: Tortured Bodies -- Chapter 2: Reading Torture -- Chapter 3: Seeing Torture -- Chapter 4: Writing Trauma -- Chapter 5: Witnessing and the Poetics of Trauma -- Chapter 6: Writing Torturous Affect -- Conclusion: Speaking Beyond Words -- Endnotes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

"After 9/11, the United States became a nation that sanctioned torture. Detainees across the globe were waterboarded, deprived of sleep, beaten by guards, blasted with deafening music and forced into obscene acts. Their torture presents a profound problem for literature: torturous pain and its traumatic aftermath have long been held to destroy language, shatter experience, and refuse representation.



Challenging accepted thinking, Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma, and Affect in Literature asks how literature might bear witness to the tortures of a war waged against fear itself. Bringing the vibrant field of affect theory to bear on theories of torture and power, Richardson adopts an  interdisciplinary approach to show how testimony founded in affect can bear witness to torture and its traumas. Grounded in provocative readings of fiction by George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Arthur Koestler, Anne Michaels and Janette Turner Hospital, poems by Guantanamo detainees, memoirs of interrogators and detainees, contemporary films, and the Torture Memos of the Bush Administration, the analysis traverses politics, law and cinema to re-think literary testimony. Drawing upon some of the most influential thinkers of recent times on power, affect, trauma and torture, the book does more than critique culture and literature: it proposes new practices of literary witnessing. Gestures of Testimony gives shape to a mode of gestural testimony, a reaching beyond the page in the writing of torture in fiction that reveals the shape, depth and intensity of violent trauma-even as it embodies its veiling."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

"Brings together theories of affect, trauma and power to propose new practices of bearing literary witness to the torture of the war on terror"--Bloomsbury Publishing.