Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma
Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma interrogates the relationship between the literary representation of postcolonial trauma and the embodied experience of reading. As the conditions from which postcolonial literatures have emerged require a break from “proper” ways to represent trauma, postcolonial writers expand and complicate the practice of reading itself.

Though postcolonial literature's capacity to represent trauma has received considerable scrutiny in recent years, Postcolonial Parabola is innovative in its consideration of the postcolonial text as a literary object. Working within a phenomenological framework that ties together disparate postcolonial periods, Jay Rajiva explores how narrative structure shapes the experience of reading the postcolonial literatures of South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He argues that these texts enmesh the reader in an asymptotic tactility: though readers might approach the disclosure of trauma, they cannot arrive at it. Awareness of the asymptotic nature of reading such works is crucial to a meaningful, ethical engagement with literary representations of postcolonial trauma.
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Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma
Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma interrogates the relationship between the literary representation of postcolonial trauma and the embodied experience of reading. As the conditions from which postcolonial literatures have emerged require a break from “proper” ways to represent trauma, postcolonial writers expand and complicate the practice of reading itself.

Though postcolonial literature's capacity to represent trauma has received considerable scrutiny in recent years, Postcolonial Parabola is innovative in its consideration of the postcolonial text as a literary object. Working within a phenomenological framework that ties together disparate postcolonial periods, Jay Rajiva explores how narrative structure shapes the experience of reading the postcolonial literatures of South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He argues that these texts enmesh the reader in an asymptotic tactility: though readers might approach the disclosure of trauma, they cannot arrive at it. Awareness of the asymptotic nature of reading such works is crucial to a meaningful, ethical engagement with literary representations of postcolonial trauma.
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Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma

Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma

by Jay Rajiva
Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma

Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma

by Jay Rajiva

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Overview

Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma interrogates the relationship between the literary representation of postcolonial trauma and the embodied experience of reading. As the conditions from which postcolonial literatures have emerged require a break from “proper” ways to represent trauma, postcolonial writers expand and complicate the practice of reading itself.

Though postcolonial literature's capacity to represent trauma has received considerable scrutiny in recent years, Postcolonial Parabola is innovative in its consideration of the postcolonial text as a literary object. Working within a phenomenological framework that ties together disparate postcolonial periods, Jay Rajiva explores how narrative structure shapes the experience of reading the postcolonial literatures of South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He argues that these texts enmesh the reader in an asymptotic tactility: though readers might approach the disclosure of trauma, they cannot arrive at it. Awareness of the asymptotic nature of reading such works is crucial to a meaningful, ethical engagement with literary representations of postcolonial trauma.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781501325359
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date: 09/21/2017
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 208
File size: 473 KB

About the Author

Jay Rajiva is Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at Georgia State University, USA.
Jay Rajiva is Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature in the Department of English at Georgia State University, USA. He works at the disciplinary intersection between postcolonial studies, trauma theory, and phenomenology, focusing on South Asian, African, and Caribbean literature. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Twentieth-Century Literature, Research in African Literatures, and Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Postcolonial Comparison
1. Excess and Tactility: Toward Interpretation as Vexed Contact
2. Transfixion and Subversion: The Unexpected Endings of J. Devi and Coetzee
3. Seduction and Substitution: Behr, Sidhwa, and the Child Narrator
4. Motion and Stillness: Surface as Depth in Dangor and Ondaatje
Conclusion: Postcolonial Relation
References
Notes
Index
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