1st Edition
Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South Women, Specularity, and the Poetics of Subjectivity
By Claire Raymond
Copyright 2014
230 Pages
by
Routledge
232 Pages
by
Routledge
232 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
Looking at works by Carrie Mae Weems, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, Carson McCullers, and Zora Neale Hurston, Claire Raymond uncovers a pattern of femininity constructed around representations of sadistic violence in American women's literature and photography from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dickinson's poetry is read through its relationship... Read more
Contents: Introduction: sadism and specularity: mirroring femininity and sadism; Empathy and risk: photography, writing, the softest voice; Projects of identity in Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried: the crucible of witnessing; Sacrificed daughters and the grammar of enslavement in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Flannery O’Connor’s ’A View of the Woods’, and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina; ’The adequate of Hell’, or, how to watch the other suffer: Dickinson, Ransom, and Tate; Queer Southern belles: the transgender object of desire in O’Connor, McCullers, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men; Sadism and the open body: Kant, Scarry, and being in relation to the suffering other; By way of a conclusion: what I have done in your name; Appendix; Works cited; Index.
Biography
Claire Raymond is a Lecturer in Art History and Sociology at the University of Virginia, USA. She is the author of Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime (Ashgate, 2010).
’Moving trauma studies in a fresh analytical direction, Claire Raymond highlights the impact of trauma and its legacy in a profound and provocative manner. Her fascinating book is a welcome addition to the field.’ Debra Walker King, University of Florida, USA
