In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a ‘crisis of natality’. Engaging with two works of fiction – Cormac McCarthy’s ...The Road and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces – the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a ‘stratigraphic time’ associated primarily with maternal responsibility – involving a temporal give-and-take that passes between generations and across thresholds in the Earth itself. If this is a construction of inter-corporeality in which each life and every breath has utmost value, it is also a vision that exceeds the biopolitical prioritization of the organismic body – as evidenced in both McCarthy’s and Michaels’ gesturing beyond the bounds of the living to a forceful, sensate and enigmatic cosmos.
Drawing on a provocative metaphor from an award-winning novel, this article argues that reflexivity can be conceived as three
gossamer walls
through which researchers construct knowledge from within ...three sets of relationships, including relations with: oneself (and the ghosts that haunt us); with research participants; and with one’s readers, audiences, and epistemological communities. On the other side of a
first
gossamer wall are relations with our many selves as well as with ‘ghosts,’ deeply buried across time and space, that may come back to haunt us when we are physically and emotionally invested in our research. Behind a
second gossamer wall
are the multi-layered relations between researchers and research respondents, relationships that can involve oral, audible, physical, emotional, textual, embodied, as well as shifting theoretical and epistemological dimensions. Finally, a
third gossamer wall
lies between ourselves and our readers and audiences as well as the epistemological or epistemic communities wherein our work is located, read, reviewed, and received. Rooted in an ethnography of Canadian primary caregiving fathers, the article contributes to current discussions of reflexivity in qualitative research practice by expanding dominant understandings of reflexivity as a self-centered exercise towards a consideration of
other
critical relationships that are part of how we come to know and write about others. The metaphor of gossamer walls, combining the sheerness of gossamer and the solidity of walls, provides for creative ways of conceptualizing reflexivity in temporal and spatial terms as well as to consider the constantly shifting degrees of transparency and obscurity, connection and separation that recur in the multiple relations that constitute reflexive research and knowing.
This essay draws on critical theories of post-Holocaust testimony and postmemory in conjunction with the emerging sociological concept of “empathetic identification” to investigate the implications ...of trauma healing in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces . The novel features two protagonist narrators—Jacob Beer, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and Ben, a child of Holocaust survivor parents—each acknowledging the moral imperatives to remember the painful past of the Holocaust as well as the need to envision the possibility of coming to terms with the horrors of the past. Contrary to Holocaust literature that focuses on the irredeemable breakdown in the psyche, Fugitive Pieces makes it the central motivating aim to ponder the complex and bewildering experience of healing. With two memoirs—Jacob’s and Ben’s—each addressing the traumatic memory for the dead and to the living, Fugitive Pieces is characteristically structured as a model of the witnessing process, a process that aims to move beyond the isolation imposed by trauma. As a theoretical starting point in my reading of Fugitive Pieces , I turn to the psychoanalytical theory of testimony and postmemory—especially the works of Dori Laub and Marianne Hirsch— to examine how testimony in association with empathetic identification can help sustain life after massive trauma.
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Acclaimed publisher and editor Neil Astley, founder of Bloodaxe Books, guest-edits this special transatlantic all-poetry issue, featuring poets from North America, Great Britain, and Ireland. The ...issue contains a stirring diversity of work, with writers who have roots everywhere from Guyana to Pakistan to Zambia, and also features poetry in Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic. Much of the work is from accomplished British poets who are still little-known in the States. As Astley writes in his introduction, the issue aims to break down “the illogical divide between readerships on either side of the Atlantic,” and spark a conversation that will enliven and invigorate both poetic traditions.
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This article deals with literary depictions of social, political, cultural and religious circumstances in which children who have lost one or both parents at birth or at a later age have found ...themselves. The weakest members of society, the children looked at here are exposed to dangers, exploitation and violence, but are fortunate enough to be rescued by a relative or other sympathetic person acting out of benevolence. Recognizing that the relationship between the orphaned child, who is in mortal danger, and a rescuer, who most frequently appears unexpectedly in a relationship, has been portrayed in narratives throughout the ages and that we can therefore speak of it as being an archetypal one, the article focuses especially on three novels by Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist (1837–1839), David Copperfield (1849–1850) and Great Expectations (1860–1861) – and in Fugitive Pieces (1996) by Canadian writer Anne Michaels. Charles Dickens earned the reputation of a classic writer through his original literary figures of orphaned children in the context of the rough capitalism of the Victorian era of the 19th century. Such originality also distinguishes Anne Michaels, whose novel Fugitive Pieces portrays the utterly traumatic circumstances that a Jewish boy is exposed to after the Germans kill his parents during the Holocaust. All the central children’s lives in these extreme situations are saved by generous people, thus highlighting the central idea of both selected authors: that evil cannot overcome good. Rescuers experience their selfless resolve to save extremely powerless and unprotected child victims of violence from life-threatening situations as a self-evident moral imperative. Through their profound and deeply experienced descriptions of memories of traumas successfully overcome by central literary figures in a spirit of compassion and solidarity, Charles Dickens and Anne Michaels have left testaments of hope against hope for future generations.
In my article on Anne Michaels' fictional work Fugitive Pieces, I introduce the critical concept of liquefaction as thematic leitmotiv that connects psychological, transgenerational trauma to ...large-scale environmental catastrophes (like floods and hurricanes) across time and place, and across international, national and domestic spaces. Through this central trope, I show how psychological post-traumatic healing in Holocaust survivors and geologic post-traumatic healing operate in tandem in the novel, more precisely how the figurative unearthing and working through of traumatic memory across generations parallels the literal unearthing and re-situating of archaeological artefacts across geologic time. The interconnectedness of psychological wounds with geological wounds demonstrates the ethics of nature - a kind of co-healing of persons and places across generations and landscapes (both transgenerational and transhistorical). I also point out the restitutive ethics of nature and maintain that floods manifest themselves as counterhistoric agents able to reveal and restore historic truth through obscuration and disclosure.
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...the debate is complicated by Shoshana Felman's response to Leys 's critique of Caruth - or as Fehnan reads it, the diatribe against her. hi The Juridical Unconscious, Fehnan accuses Leys of ...resorting to polemic that is not only parasitic and derivative, but that also reduces 'the momentous stakes of trauma to the triviality of academic conflict'. ...denigration of sentient human beings prepares for its textual consequence, the hiding of 'countless manuscripts - diaries, memoirs, eyewitness accounts', which were 'buried in back gardens, tucked into walls and under floors - by those who did not live to retrieve them' (epigraph to FP). ...his purported autobiography is Michaels's fictional invention; secondly Beer survives his ordeal in the Polish forest and forges a career as a writer and translator, only to be killed in a car accident as a man of sixty. Since memory is an integral aspect of any response to trauma, the remembering, reliving and reconfiguring of damagingly formative experiences plays a shaping role throughout Fugitive Pieces.
Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces diverges from earlier literature of the Holocaust in its engagement with the pastoral tradition. While the pastoral had been appropriated by the Nazis as part of their ...Blood and Soil ideology, Michaels reclaims and revises the pastoral and its sister genre, the elegy. She creates a traumatic pastoral focused on geological cataclysm and redefines Blood and Soil through images of soil soaked with blood. Michaels allows an anthropomorphized nature to grieve, but by presenting images of infertility rather than fertility she refuses the traditional compensatory apparatus of the elegy.
The aim of this article is to explore a tension in understanding post-Holocaust writing, specifically Second Generation poetry, between the idea of ‘working through’ and the complexities of ...post-Holocaust writing that Antony Rowland describes as ‘awkward poetics’, the ‘noncathartic artistry of disaster’.
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