Studies in The Novel 

About: Studies in The Novel is an academic journal published by University of North Texas Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Narrative & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 0039-3827. Over the lifetime, 775 publications have been published receiving 4471 citations.

Introduction: postcolonial trauma novels

Abstract: Trauma studies, an area of cultural investigation that came to prominence in the early-to-mid-1990s, prides itself on its explicit commitment to ethics, which sets it apart from the poststructuralist criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s in which it has its roots. Standing accused of irrelevance or indifference to "real-world" issues such as history, politics, and ethics because of its predominantly epistemological focus, this earlier, "textualist" paradigm was largely eclipsed around the mid-1980s by overtly historicist or culturalist approaches, including new historicism, cultural materialism, cultural studies, and various types of advocacy criticism (feminist, lesbian and gay, Marxist, and postcolonial). Trauma studies can with some justification be regarded as the reinvention in an ethical guise of this much maligned textualism. Cathy Caruth, one of the leading figures in trauma studies (along with Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, and Dominick LaCapra), counters the oft-heard critique of poststructuralism outlined above by arguing that, rather than leading us away from history and into "political and ethical paralysis" (Unclaimed 10), a textualist approach can afford us unique access to history. Indeed, it makes possible a "rethinking of reference," which aims not at "eliminating history" but at "resituating it in our understanding, that is, at permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not" (11). By bringing the insights of deconstructive and psychoanalytic scholarship to the analysis of cultural artifacts that bear witness to traumatic histories, critics can gain access to extreme events and experiences that defy understanding and representation. Caruth insists on the ethical significance of this critical practice. She claims that "the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demand" a "new mode of reading and of listening" (9) that would allow us to pass out of the isolation imposed on both individuals and cultures by traumatic experience. In "a catastrophic age" such as ours, according to Caruth, "trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures" ("Trauma" 11). With trauma forming a bridge between disparate historical experiences, so the argument goes, listening to the trauma of another can contribute to cross-cultural solidarity and to the creation of new forms of community. Remarkably, however, trauma studies' stated commitment to the promotion of cross-cultural ethical engagement is not borne out by the founding texts of the field (including Caruth's own work), which are almost exclusively concerned with traumatic experiences of white Westerners and solely employ critical methodologies emanating from a Euro-American context. (1) Instead of promoting solidarity between different cultures, trauma studies risks producing the very opposite effect as a result of this one-sided focus: by ignoring or marginalizing non-Western traumatic events and histories and non-Western theoretical work, trauma studies may actually assist in the perpetuation of Eurocentric views and structures that maintain or widen the gap between the West and the rest of the world. If, as Caruth argues, "history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas" (Unclaimed 24), then Western traumatic histories must be seen to be tied up with histories of colonial trauma for trauma studies to be able to redeem its promise of ethical effectiveness. Attempts to give the suffering engendered by colonial oppression its "traumatic due" have begun to be made in various disciplines in recent years. Mental health professionals, for example, are becoming increasingly aware of the need to acknowledge traumatic experiences in non-Western settings and to take account of cultural differences in the treatment of trauma. These concerns are reflected in the titles of two recent collections of essays: Trauma and Dissociation in a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Not Just a North American Phenomenon (2006) and Honoring Differences: Cultural Issues in the Treatment of Trauma and Loss (1999). …

Decolonizing trauma studies: a response

Abstract: Andre Schwarz-Bart's slim novel A Woman Named Solitude (La mulatresse Solitude, 1972) tells an epic tale of trans-Atlantic slavery with implications for contemporary trauma studies. Over the course of Solitude, the descendants of a pastoral African landscape depicted at the novel's opening become diasporic subjects in the Caribbean-still tilling the land but under significantly different conditions. Captured, deported, and raped during the Middle Passage, the novel's protagonist Bayangumay gives birth to a daughter, "la mulatresse Solitude" ("the mulatto Solitude"), a legendary figure in Guadeloupe's history. Solitude is later executed for her role in a slave rebellion the day after giving birth to her own child, who is also destined to live as someone's property. In the novel's brief epilogue, the narrator breaks the historical frame of the text and imagines that a tourist will one day come to visit the plantation where Solitude and other rebels fought against their enslavement--a site that was dynamited in desperation by the rebellion's leader: If the traveler insists, he will be permitted to visit the remains of the old Danglemont plantation. The guard will wave his hand, and as though by magic a tattered black field worker will appear. He will greet the lover of old stones with a vaguely incredulous look, and they will start off.... [T]hey will stroll this way and that and ultimately come to a remnant of knee-high wall and a mound of earth intermingled with bone splinters.... Conscious of a faint taste of ashes, the visitor will take a few steps at random, tracing wider and wider circles around the site of the mansion. His foot will collide with one of the building stones, concealed by dead leaves, which were dispersed by the explosion and then over the years buffed, dug up, covered over, and dug up again by the innocent hoes of the field workers. If he is in the mood to salute a memory, his imagination will people the environing space, and human figures will rise up around him, just as the phantoms that wander about the humiliated ruins of the Warsaw ghetto are said to rise up before the eyes of other travelers. (A Woman 149-50) In these concluding sentences of the novel, Schwarz-Bart depicts a landscape of trauma replete with ruins, bone splinters, ashes, and phantoms. (1) He mobilizes various forms of anachronism and "anatopism" (spatial misplacement) in order to depict multiple traumatic legacies. (2) Like the novel's opening paragraphs, this passage mingles the mythical and the mundane. But in the place of the opening's invocation of the fairy-tale ("Once upon a time," the novel begins [3]), more gothic, even traumatic, temporalities emerge in the epilogue. Like the fragments of bone, time is literally splintered. While the novel proper moves continuously from Africa to Guadeloupe and from the mid-eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, the epilogue jumps to the contemporary moment of the novel's enunciation and to a hypothetical, layered European/ Caribbean space. Both the presumably European traveler and the West Indian guide appear equally displaced spatially and temporally--the former because of his perplexing love of "old stones," the latter because of his magical emergence and tattered appearance. As ruin, the site of the plantation is itself disjoined from the present, half-buried by nearly two centuries of "innocent" activities but still testifying to a violent past. If, as many of the contributors to this important special issue of Studies in the Novel convincingly argue, turn-of-the-millennium trauma studies has remained stuck within Euro-American conceptual and historical frameworks, Schwarz-Bart's work demonstrates another tendency: for sixty years (at least), certain writers and intellectuals have been seeking to articulate traumas within Europe with traumas in colonial and postcolonial space. …

The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel

Abstract: Over the last decade a number of novels have displayed a various and intriguing range of historical commitments. Although I will not attempt to take on the whole range here, I do want to explore a subset of the historical novel I think I can clearly delineate, or at least two exemplars of this subset. I call this particular category the neo-Victorian novel, and I read it as at once characteristic of postmodernism and imbued with a historicity reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novel.(1) In order to develop my own argument, I will make rather free use of Fredric Jameson's critique of postmodernism, particularly his critique of postmodern representations of history. In his attacks on postmodernism, Jameson has decried its supplanting of the redemptive project of history with "the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past,"(2) an approach he finds problematic because if one's relation to the past is a matter of randomly retrieving various "styles," then one loses the impetus to find out what actually happened in that past. As a Marxist critic for whom the purpose of history is "the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future" (CL, p. 18), Jameson finds in postmodern historicity an ever-widening gap between the actual lived past and its representation. According to Jameson, postmodern skepticism regarding how much we can really know about the past has resulted in nostalgia for the "look" of the past without significant interest in its substance.(3) Consequently, the past as historical referent is dissolved in self-reflexive textuality: "the past as `referent' finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts" (CL, p. 18). Jameson acknowledges that history is an "absent cause" that is never completely representable, and yet he insists that "History is not in any sense itself a text or master text or master narrative, but that it is inaccessible to us except in textual or narrative form, or in other words, that we approach it only by way of some prior textualization or narrative (re)construction."(4) Jameson is concerned that the postmodern preoccupation with history-as-text has shifted attention away from the actual events of the past, toward the interpretation of those events. What appears to disturb Jameson most about postmodern representations of the past, be they fictional, filmic, or architectural, is that they strip away its specific political content to focus on its aesthetics. Instead of respecting the radical difference of bygone eras, postmodernism projects onto them contemporary culture, fabricating a "privatized," or subjective, history denuded of its specific cultural resonance.(5) Epitomizing this kind of historicism for Jameson is a film like Body Heat, which stylistically "connotes" 1940s film noir through the language of nostalgia, but is actually set in 1980s Florida (CL, p. 19). The past, according to this cultural logic, becomes a treasure trove to be mined for pertinent connections and similarities to our postmodern world, an approach that for Jameson creates a false continuity between past and present. Jameson argues that using history responsibly means reading it for traces of the "uninterrupted narrative" of class struggle, and bringing to the surface of the text this "repressed and buried reality" (PU, p. 20). In effect, he sees past and present as having continuity only insofar as they can be united in a Marxist interpretive framework, which he claims is uniquely qualified to evade the "double bind" of antiquarianism and the postmodern tendency to project contemporary relevance onto history (PU, p. 19). The former posits an artificial rupture between past and present; the latter creates a false connection. In his well-known indictment of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Jameson claims that the historical novel can no longer represent the historical past, but can only represent our ideas and stereotypes about that past (CL, p. …

Twilight is Not Good for Maidens: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Series

Abstract: "Dear, you should not stay so late, Twilight is not good for maidens; Should not loiter in the glen In the haunts of goblin men." --Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market" Although I regularly teach children's and young adult literature to undergraduate students, it took my son's babysitter to alert me to the phenomenon of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga, the now ubiquitous quartet of novels about 17-year-old Bella Swan and her vampire beau, Edward Cullen. My babysitter, who suffers from dyslexia and therefore reads quite slowly, had nonetheless made her way through texts whose lengths rival the great Victorian novels. Indeed, this young woman's passionate investment in these stories brings to mind nineteenth-century readers clamoring at the docks for the latest installments of Dickens's work, and makes her one of a large community of girls and women who have made the Twilight series among the best selling young adult novels of all time. Over 50 million of the books have been sold, the first two of scheduled four film adaptations have been released, and the number of self-admittedly obsessed "Team Edward" fans continues to grow. Meanwhile, Meyer, the erstwhile unknown Mormon housewife who wrote the first installment of the series after dreaming about a vampire and a young girl in a meadow, was named one of Time magazine's most influential people of 2008. The tremendous success of the novels has surprised some critics, especially those feminist media and literary critics who argue that the series perpetuates outdated and troubling gender norms. Edward, these critics claim, is frequently controlling and domineering, saving the hapless Bella time and again from danger; Bella suffers from low self-esteem and seemingly has no close friends except for Edward, his family, and Jacob, a suitor-turned-werewolf; and, at the end of the series, she foregoes college in order to marry Edward and bear, at great risk to her own life, a half-human and half-vampire child. Elizabeth Hand is representative of feminist critics when she argues in The Washington Post that "there's something distinctly queasy about the male-female dynamic that emerges over the series' 2,446 pages. Edward has been frozen at the age of 17. But he was born in 1901, and he doesn't behave anything like a real teenager. He talks and acts like an obsessively controlling adult male" (7). Numerous blogs and groups such as Feminist Mormon Housewives and the Facebook group Twilightmoms have also analyzed the gender dynamics of the series, even from inside the sometimes rabid fan community. Chelsea, writing on Feminist Mormon Housewives, posts, "I find the message to young girls disturbing. That love is an irresistible force that precludes making any rational decisions. That it's OK (even noble) to sacrifice your personal safety if you 'really' love someone" (n.p.). Claims such as these reveal the concern that many critics and readers feel about the books' tremendous popularity and the messages that they impart to girls about romance and women's roles in sexual relationships. Do the books promote retrograde ideas about female submission to male authority? Are the books particularly troubling in the genre of young adult (YA) literature, whose readers might not yet have developed the critical apparatus of the adult reader? The criticisms leveled against the series in the press indicate that it deserves a more in-depth discussion than it has yet received. The novels' gender ideology is ultimately and unapologetically patriarchal. However, focusing merely on Edward and Bella's romance obscures larger themes that the novels also explore, and that add to the series' appeal and cultural significance, particularly within the genre of young adult fiction. Although Edward and Bella are the center of the novel's narrative, the series is equally concerned with the contemporary American nuclear family, and a woman's role within that family. …

Who Speaks? Who Listens?: The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels

Abstract: Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders' army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud refers to this moment in Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered as an example of the unconscious repetition of trauma. Tancred's unknowing killing of his beloved not just once, but twice, illustrates for Freud a passive compulsion to repeat that makes up part of the dynamics of trauma (16). In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth expands upon Freud's reading of this moment by drawing attention "to a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound" (2-3). Doing so, she reads this scene as an illustration of the latency of trauma and the ethical address delivered through this belated knowing: "The figure of Tancred addressed by the speaking wound constitutes, in other words, not only a parable of trauma and of its uncanny repetition but, more generally, a parable of psychoanalytic theory itself as it listens to a voice that it cannot fully know but to which it nonetheless bears witness" (9). Freud's and Caruth's readings of this tale illustrate the difficulty of using trauma theory to read the experience of the colonized Other. One dilemma with these readings is that they rewrite one woman's bodily experience of trauma as the trauma of the male consciousness. In Caruth's analysis, Tancred is both the traumatized subject and the witness to an enigmatic otherness. Although Caruth's formulation draws attention to and attempts to listen to the voice of the Other, it is Tancred who remains "psychoanalytic theory itself." But Tancred does not experience the trauma; Clorinda does. (1) And the voice that cries out from the wound is not a universal voice, nor is it a generic female voice: it is the female voice of black Africa. This episode in Jerusalem Delivered tells of the death of the woman warrior Clorinda who fights against the Christian crusaders led by Tancred. She is the white daughter of the black Christian King and Queen of Ethiopia. Because of Clorinda's color and fear of the King's reprisal, the Queen gives Clorinda away at birth to a pagan Eunuch to raise. Only at the moment of her first death does Clorinda ask for a Christian baptism. Thus, already in Tasso's story, Clorinda has been whitened and Christianized to make her an acceptable lover for his hero. In this act, we witness an early European discursive encounter with a racial and religious Other, a representation that is repeated in Freud's and Caruth's readings of Tancred not as the perpetrator of trauma but as the victim of it. I draw attention to this textual encounter in the foundational works of early and contemporary trauma theory because it stages the traumatic relationship between the Western knowing consciousness and the silent, unknowable African Other and demonstrates the difficulty of representing that Other within such theories. In putting together this collection on postcolonial trauma novels, Stef Craps and Gert Buelens ask a number of questions, among them, how trauma studies can redeem its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement and whether postcolonial trauma narratives present challenges to trauma theory. If the story of Tancred is the scene of psychoanalytic writing, it reveals, I argue, that the discourse of trauma is founded upon an erasure of the voice of the Colonial Other. Caruth identifies trauma as an ethical discourse of the Other because it "opens up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility" ("Introduction" 10). However, this formulation erects a structural barrier to such an understanding in so much as it positions the Other in the place of "impossibility" while situating the addressee in the illuminated space of knowledge and the possible. …