Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization

Jennifer Ballengee is Martha A. Mitten Professor of Liberal Arts and Director of the Graduate Program in Global Humanities at Towson University. She is the author of The Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of Torture (SUNY 2009) and articles in the Yale Journal of Criticism, Modern Language Studies, Ancient Narrative, Literary Imagination, and Post 45, among others. Her work addresses questions of the body, politics, rhetoric, and representation. She is currently finishing a monograph on ruins, tragedy, and national ideology. David Kelman is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton. He is the author of Counterfeit Politics: Secret Plots and Conspiracy Narratives in the Americas (Bucknell UP, 2012). He is also the author of several articles on the theory and practice of comparison. His work has been published in New Vico Studies, CR: The New Centennial Review, Comparative Literature, Pynchon Notes, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Mosaic, and Angelaki.

Introduction

Jennifer Ballengee and David Kelman

Part I: Trauma, Deconstruction, and Global Relations

1. Globalization and the Theory of Trauma: A Conversation with Cathy Caruth

Cathy Caruth

2. The Cut that Links: Paracomparatism in Caruth and Danticat

David Kelman

3. Common Catastrophes: or, Personification Reconsidered

Brian McGrath

4. Fugitive Sovereignties in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy: Deconstructing the "Unparalleled Catastrophe" of the Human

Mina Karavanta

Part II: Politics and Literature

5. The Foreign Body in Psychoanalysis and Politics: A Conversation with Elissa Marder

Elissa Marder

6. Reverberations: Traumatic Histories, Cultural Difference, and the Drama of Listening in Eileen Chang’s Yuannü and The Rouge of the North

Emily Sun

7. Some Iterations of Blood

Brett Levinson

8. "How Very Godfather Part II of you": Trauma and Intertextual Comparison in A Brief History of Seven Killings

Jay Rajiva

9. Framing the World: Texts that Circulate and People Who Cannot

Başak Çandar

Part III: Literature and Human Rights

10. Literature, the Humanities, and Political Action: A Conversation with Elisabeth Weber

Elisabeth Weber

11. Killing Dogs: Animality and Trauma in Waltz with Bashir and Deogratias

Russell Samolsky

12. Flood Poetics: Nigeria, New Orleans, and Oṣundare’s City without People

Avery Slater

13. Phantom Work: Refugees, Antigone, Comparative Literature

Jennifer Ballengee

14. Rights, Politics, and Engagement: A Conversation with Thomas Keenan

Thomas Keenan