Signifying Loss
Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning
1st Edition
Published on 20. January 2011
228 pages
978-1-61148-035-1 (ISBN)
Description
By remapping the configurations of mourning across modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literatures, psychoanalysis and deconstruction (James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Elias Khoury, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida), Signifying Loss studies not only how loss is signified but also the ethico-political significance of such signifying. First, by examining the dynamics between narrative tropes and mourning, it elaborates a poetics of narrative mourning in which prosopopoeia becomes the master trope of mourning while catachresis the master trope of melancholia and chiasmus of trauma. Second, it develops a situated and flexible theory of mourning, capable of adjusting to diverse contexts in which the ethical and political stakes of mourning are different-in short, Signifying Loss calls for the formulation of geopolitical and differential tactics of mourning and mournability rather that for a clear cut strategy of inconsolability.
More details
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Associated University Presses
Target group
College/higher education
ISBN-13
978-1-61148-035-1 (9781611480351)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
01/2011
Bucknell University Press,U.S.
€122.50
Shipment within 3-4 weeks
Person
Nouri Gana is assistant professor of comparative literature and Near Eastern languages and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Content
Preface: The Poetics of Mourning
Acknowledgments
1. Thresholds of Mourning: Freud and After
2. Horizons of Desire, Horizons of Mourning: Joyce's Dubliners
3. The Vicissitudes of Melancholia in Freud and Joyce
4. Kincaid's Claim: The Poetics and Politics of Melancholia
5. The Ineluctable Modality of "Posthumous Infidelity": The Ethics of Mourning in Kincaid, Derrida, and Ben Jelloun
6. Formless Form: Elias Khoury's City Gates and the Poetics of Trauma
Coda: The Politics of Mourning
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
1. Thresholds of Mourning: Freud and After
2. Horizons of Desire, Horizons of Mourning: Joyce's Dubliners
3. The Vicissitudes of Melancholia in Freud and Joyce
4. Kincaid's Claim: The Poetics and Politics of Melancholia
5. The Ineluctable Modality of "Posthumous Infidelity": The Ethics of Mourning in Kincaid, Derrida, and Ben Jelloun
6. Formless Form: Elias Khoury's City Gates and the Poetics of Trauma
Coda: The Politics of Mourning
Notes
Bibliography
Index
