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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Going No Place?: Foreground Nostalgia And Psychological Spaces In Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Sean Scanlan
Going No Place?: Foreground Nostalgia And Psychological Spaces In Wharton's The House Of Mirth, Sean Scanlan
Publications and Research
This essay argues that the power of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth comes not from Lily Bart's function as a mere symptom of historical and economic pressures, but from the complex narrative and psychological process by which she negotiates a sequence of homes and their repeated collapse. Informing this process is nostalgia, a feeling that frames Lily Bart's step-by-step fall from riches to rags. Reading Lily via cognitive and family systems approaches suggests that Lily's rootlessness is predicated on a subtle transformation from her reliance upon simple “background” (aesthetic and monetary) nostalgia to a more complex and overwhelming “foreground” …
Trauma And The Representation Of The Unsayable In Late Twentieth-Century Fiction, Katina Rogers
Trauma And The Representation Of The Unsayable In Late Twentieth-Century Fiction, Katina Rogers
Publications and Research
This dissertation explores the ways in which several fiction writers from France, the U.S., and Latin America experiment with the form of their works in writing about traumatic experience, as they navigate the tension between a propulsion toward expression and toward silence. Some of these traumas are vast, as in Edmond Jabès’ Le livre des questions (1963-1973), which addresses not only the Holocaust, but also questions of exile and identity. Others are on a smaller scale, such as Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noir (1986), Julio Cortázar's Los autonautas de la cosmopista (1983), and Macedonio Fernández’s Museo de la Novela de …