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This book investigates discursive structures intermittently recurring through Gothic writing, and provides intertextual readings, exemplifications of contemporaneously understood, discursively inflected, debate. By drawing on the ideas of Michel Foucault to establish a genealogy, it brings Gothic writing in from the margins of 'popular fiction', resituating it at the centre of debate about Romanticism. The book stresses that the intertextual readings form the methodological lynchpin for interpreting Gothic writing as self-aware debate on the character of the subject. Foucault's theory of discourse enables readers to gain an historical purchase on Gothic writing. The book traces the genealogy of a particular strand, the 'Gothic aesthetic', where a chivalric past was idealized at the explicit expense of a classical present. It introduces the reader to the aspects of Gothic in the eighteenth century including its historical development and its placement within the period's concerns with discourse and gender.
three investigate discursive structures intermittently recurring through Gothic writing while the remaining chapters provide intertextual readings, exemplifications of contemporaneously understood, discursively inflected, debate. I want to stress here that these intertextual readings form the methodological lynchpin for interpreting Gothic writing as self-aware debate on the character of the subject. If
Samuel Beckett and trauma is a collection of essays that opens new approaches to Beckett’s literary and theoretical work through the lens of trauma studies. Beginning with biographical and intertextual readings of instances of trauma in Beckett’s works, the essays take up performance studies, philosophical and cultural understanding of post-traumatic subjectivity, and provide new perspectives that will expand and alter current trauma studies.
Chapter 1 deals with a whole range of traumatic symptoms in Beckett’s personal experiences which find their ways into a number of his works. Chapter 2 investigates traumatic symptoms experienced by actors on stage. Chapter 3 examines the problem of unspeakability by focusing on the face which illuminates the interface between Beckett’s work and trauma theory. Chapter 4 explores the relationship between trauma and skin – a psychic skin that reveals the ‘force and truth’ of trauma, a force that disrupts the apparatus of representation. Chapter 5 considers trauma caused by a bodily defect such as tinnitus. Chapter 6 focuses on the historically specific psychological structure in which a wounded subject is compelled to stick to ordinary life in the aftermath of some traumatic calamity. Chapter 7 provides a new way of looking at birth trauma by using the term as ‘creaturely life’ that is seen in the recent biopolitical discourses. Chapter 8 speculates on how Beckett’s post-war plays, responding to the nuclear age’s global trauma, resonate with ethical and philosophical thoughts of today’s post-Cold War era.
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
Samuel Beckett Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). 14 Michael Riffaterre, ‘Interpretation and undecidability’, New Literary History , 12 (1981), 227–242, 227. Riffaterre’s thesis is opposed by Gérard Genette, who maintains that in any hypertext (i.e. target text or primary text) ‘there is an ambiguity which Riffaterre denies to the intertextual reading’; he advocates instead what he calls ‘lecture palimpsestueuse’. Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 450. 15
intertextual readings, material from the contextual chapters intermittently appears. The driving force of this book, however, was not simply to write a survey in marked contrast with its now venerable, but dated, predecessors. Rather it was to address the issue broached at the very beginning of this study: the problematic issue of the self’s history Has the self a history outside of its representations? Are
Intertextual Reading of Donne’s “Satyre 4” and Spenser’s Faerie Queene ’, Studies in Philology , 112.2 (2015 Spring), 264–302. 35 My own monograph in progress, Donne’s Spenser: Between Allegory and Metaphor , aims to correct this gap. Segments from this project have been published in article form: Yulia Ryzhik, ‘Complaint and Satire in Spenser and Donne: Limits of Poetic Justice’, English Literary Renaissance , 47.1 (2017 Spring), 110–35, and ‘Spenser and Donne Go Fishing’, Spenser Studies , 31–2 (2018), 417–37. 36
ways of reading and understanding Beckett’s work in relation to trauma. Beginning with biographical and intertextual readings of instances of trauma in his work, the essays take up a range of innovative approaches to Beckett, inspired by theories of trauma. The volume consists of three parts that are interrelated and together cover important aspects of the representation of trauma in Beckett’s work. Part I, ‘Trauma symptoms’, analyses the trauma symptoms that are shown in Beckett’s characters, or that are experienced by performers enacting them, the audience watching
’s Strike (1924). 4 All these points of comparison would provide an interesting focus for intertextual readings, but the one I want to concentrate on here is the striking similarity between the close-up of Manuel’s face raised to look up at the white cow, and Willard’s face, raised to look up at Kurtz. Willard’s camouflaged face accentuates his wide, staring eyes in the same way that Carmelo’s blood accentuates Manuel
my gaze from them, turning a little to the other pole, there whence the Wain had already disappeared The stars of Purgatorio I, called in the canto ‘fiammelle’, are merged with the ‘fiammette’ (both words mean ‘little flames’) of Inferno VIII; the ‘little flames’ become ‘fires’. The intertextual reading is corroborated by the metanarrative comment ‘enough’, which indicates the ‘fatigue and disgust’ of ‘adding’ another inevitable allusive layer to the story. A similar phenomenon can be observed in the encounter