Terrorizing Images : : Trauma and Ekphrasis in Contemporary Literature / / Charles Ivan Armstrong, Unni Langas.

• Author: Langas, Unni
• HerausgeberIn: Armstrong, Charles Ivan,; Langas, Unni,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: Culture and Conflict
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (VI, 204 p.)

It is broadly accepted that "terrorizing" images are often instrumentalized in periods of conflict to serve political interests. This volume proposes that paying attention to how images of trauma and conflict are described in literary texts, i.e. to the rhetorical practice known as "ekphrasis", is crucial to our understanding of how such images work. The volume's contributors discuss verbal images of trauma and terror in literary texts both from a contemporary perspective and as historical artefacts in order to illuminate the many different functions of ekphrasis in literature. The articles in this volume reflect the vast developments in the field of trauma studies since the 1990s, a field that has recently broadened to include genres beyond the memoir and testimony and that lends itself well to new postcolonial, feminist, and multimedia approaches. By expanding the scholarly understanding of how images of trauma are described, interpreted, and acted out in literary texts, this collected volume makes a significant contribution to both trauma and memory studies, as well as more broadly to cultural studies.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Introduction: Encounters between Trauma and Ekphrasis, Words and Images -- De te fabula narratur! Violence and Representation in Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance -- What Does It Mean To Be Human? Speculative Ekphrasis and Anthropocene Trauma in Don DeLillo's Zero K -- The Ordinariness of Trauma: Reconstructing Intertextuality as an Aesthetics of Trauma -- Terrorizing Images and Traumatic Anticipation in Michael Cunningham's The Hours -- Phantomogenic Ekphrasis: Traumatizing Images in Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days and Don DeLillo's Falling Man -- Reenacting Rape in Édouard Louis's History of Violence -- Empathic Vision? War Photography, Ekphrasis, and Memory in Bosnian War Literature -- Remedial Intermediality: Ekphrasis in Sinéad Morrissey's "The Doctors" -- Traumatizing Images of Belfast in Mary Costello's Novel Titanic Town -- Ekphrasis and the Holocaust: Traumatic Images in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones -- White Oblivion: Antarctica and the Suspension of Trauma -- Contributors -- Index