“New Words, New Everything”: Fragmentation and Trauma in Jean Rhys

Linett, Maren

doi:10.1215/0041462x-2005-1006

Cited by 15 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Like Eugenides's debut book, The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex adopts a strong anti‐medical discourse that denounces the clinical treatment of intersexuality via surgery as the very origin of trauma. Some critics see traumatic experience as a “breach in the mind's experience of time, self, and the world” and situate it in a “no time region” (Caruth , 4; Linett , 450). In his fictional memoir, the narrator describes his earlier period and treatment at the hospital, as Callie, in this manner: “It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, ‘Stay there.…”

Section: Narrating Trauma: Tragicomedy In Middlesexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remembering Ethnicity in Middlesex

Kostova

2015

Orbis Litterarum

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Jeffrey Eugenides's second novel, Middlesex (2002), deals with processes of coming to terms with trauma by connecting opposites in humorous and imaginative ways. The protagonist and narrator of the novel, Cal Stephanides, recovers the ethnic legacy of his Greek-American family in order to work through his trauma of intersexuality. Trauma is manifested in a number of textual and thematic strategies related to the modal use of tragicomedy. The discursive act of healing this trauma is carried out by combining suffering and laughter, seriousness and playfulness, engagement and detachment in a textual artifact, thus attaining "narrative repair" (Nelson 2001). By going against coherent and closed structures, the hybrid, tragicomic mode enhances affect and closeness, while at the same time distancing the narrator (and the reader) emotionally. The tragicomic vision also contributes to the working-through of trauma by means of an empathic acceptance of human suffering and of traumatic past.

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Section: Narrating Trauma: Tragicomedy In Middlesexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remembering Ethnicity in Middlesex

Kostova

2015

Orbis Litterarum

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“…By contrast, traumatic memories are the memories of extreme events which cannot be assimilated by the mind, and therefore, surface to the conscious as dissociated images which find no logical place in the lineal structure of the narrative memory. Drawing on these ideas, Maren Linett defines traumatic memories as “bits of images or memories that erupt inexplicably into consciousness… moments of mental dissonance [that] interrupt logical narration and so can be seen as subverting norms of coherence and unity” (444). Traumatic memories return unexpectedly to plague a traumatised mind that is not capable of integrating them within the structure of narrative memory.…”

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confidence: 99%