The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture

ISBN-13: 9783030834241 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 356 str.

Rudolf Freiburg; Gerd Bayer

Opis

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture delves into the complex problems involved in all attempts to survive. The essays analyze survival in contemporary prose narratives, short stories, poems, dramas, and theoretical texts, but also in films and other modes of cultural practices. Addressing  diverse topics such as memory and forgetting in Holocaust narratives, stories of refugees and asylum seekers, and representations of war, the ethical implications involved in survival in texts and media are brought into a transnational critical discussion. The volume will be of potential interest to a wide range of critics working on ethical issues, the body, and the politics of art and literature.

Spis treści

1. Survival: An Introductory Essay.- Part I. Survival and the Group.- 2. The Visibility of Survival: Even the Dogs and Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Attention.- 3. “Survivors all”: Affirmative Connections in Novels by Julian Barnes and Caryl Phillips.- 4. Feats of Survival: Refugee Writing and the Ethics of Representation.- 5. Surviving Trauma in the Female Neo-slave Narrative: Sara Collins’s Neo-gothic The Confessions of Frannie Langton.- Part II. Survival and the Individual.- 6. “That was what all men became: techniques for survival”: The Paradoxical Notion of Survival in Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time.- 7. Vulnerability, Empathy, and the Ethics of Survival in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here.- 8. Stories of Dis-ease: Ethics and Survival in Dementia Narratives.- 9. Surviving: Jenny Diski, Illness, and Gratitude.- 10. Environmental Ethics of Survival: Case Study Analysis of I am Legend and The Revenant.- Part III Survival and the Holocaust.- 11. Close Reading of a Title: On Survival in Auschwitz.- 12. Narrative Closure and the “Whew” Effect: The Ethics of Reading Narratives of Survival of the Holocaust.- 13. With All the Force of Literalness: Ruth Klüger’s Survivor Testimonies in Erwin Leiser’s We Were Ten Brothers and Thomas Mitscherlich’s Journeys into Life.- 14. “The Four Brothers”: Claude Lanzmann’s War Refugee Board Interviews.

O autorze

Rudolf Freiburg is Professor of English literature at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is co-editor and editor of several books, including Swift: The Enigmatic Dean (1998), “But Vindicate the Ways of God to Man”: Literature and Theodicy (2004), Kultbücher (2004), Literatur und Holocaust (2009), Träume (2015), Unendlichkeit (2016), D@tenflut (2017), Sprachwelten (2018) and Täuschungen (2019). He has written many articles on eighteenth-century literature (Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson), and contemporary literature (John Fowles, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Sebastian Barry).

Gerd Bayer is Professor of English literature and culture at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He has published on contemporary and early modern literature, including Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2015) and on Holocaust literature and film, most recently as guest editor of a special issue for Holocaust Studies (UK).

Blurb

The Ethics of Survival provides us with a kaleidoscope of intellectually inquisitive, intriguing and invariably topical perspectives on human suffering, trauma and testimony in close dialogue with the increasingly urgent challenges of both individual and collective care and responsibility. The fourteen original essays expertly assembled here by Freiburg and Bayer reinvigorate and indeed rewrite the global ethics agenda for scholarly debate and critical analysis across the disciplines of literature, philosophy and cultural history, problematizing contemporary quandaries against the background of the Holocaust’s enduringly horrific legacy. The volume launches a thought-provoking intervention into extremely sensitive and controversial terrain where humanity must confront its own fallibility, destructiveness and pain beyond humanism’s much-vaunted catalogue of traditional ideals.

 

—Prof. Berthold Schoene, Faculty Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange for Arts and Humanities, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

 

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture delves into the complex problems involved in all attempts to survive. The essays analyze survival in contemporary prose narratives, short stories, poems, dramas, and theoretical texts, but also in films and other modes of cultural practices. Addressing  diverse topics such as memory and forgetting in Holocaust narratives, stories of refugees and asylum seekers, and representations of war, the ethical implications involved in survival in texts and media are brought into a transnational critical discussion. The volume will be of potential interest to a wide range of critics working on ethical issues, the body, and the politics of art and literature

Rudolf Freiburg is Professor of English literature at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is co-editor and editor of several books, including Swift: The Enigmatic Dean (1998), “But Vindicate the Ways of God to Man”: Literature and Theodicy (2004), Kultbücher (2004), Literatur und Holocaust (2009), Träume (2015), Unendlichkeit (2016), D@tenflut (2017), Sprachwelten (2018) and Täuschungen (2019). He has written many articles on eighteenth-century literature (Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson), and contemporary literature (John Fowles, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Sebastian Barry).

Gerd Bayer is Professor of English literature and culture at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He has published on contemporary and early modern literature, including Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2015) and on Holocaust literature and film, most recently as guest editor of a special issue for Holocaust Studies (UK).