The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction

190 Pages·2015·1.04 MB·English

by  Jean-Michel Ganteau

The Ethics and Aesthetics of
Vulnerability in Contemporary
British Fiction
This book visits vulnerability in contemporary British fiction, considering
vulnerability in its relation to poetics, politics, ethics, and trauma. Vulner-
ability and risk have become central issues in contemporary culture, and
artistic productions have increasingly made it their responsibility to evoke
various types of vulnerabilities, from individual fragilities to economic and
political forms of precariousness and dispossession. Informed by trauma
studies and the ethics of literature, this book addresses such issues by focus-
ing on the literary evocations of vulnerability and analyzing various aspects
of vulnerable form as represented and performed in British narratives, from
contemporary classics by Peter Ackroyd, Pat Barker, Anne Enright, Ian
McEwan, and Jeanette Winterson, to less canonical texts by Nina Allan, Jon
McGregor, and Nicholas Royle. Chapters on romance, elegy, the ghost story,
and the state-of-the-nation novel draw on a variety of theoretical approaches
from the fields of trauma studies, affect theory, the ethics of alterity, the eth-
ics of care, and the ethics of vulnerability, among others. Showcasing how
the contemporary novel is the privileged site of the expression and perfor-
mance of vulnerability and vulnerable form, the volume broaches a poet-
ics of vulnerability based on categories such as testimony, loss, unknowing,
temporal disarray, and performance. On top of providing a book-length
evocation of contemporary fictions of vulnerability and vulnerable form,
this volume contributes significantly to considerations of the importance of
trauma studies to contemporary literature.
Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of English Literature at Paul Valéry Uni-
versity, Montpellier, France.
Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
1 Literature After 9/11 8 Trauma and Romance
Edited by Ann Keniston and in Contemporary British
Jeanne Follansbee Quinn Literature
Edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau
2 Reading Chuck Palahniuk and Susana Onega
American Monsters and
Literary Mayhem 9 Spatial Politics in
Edited by Cynthia Kuhn and Contemporary London
Lance Rubin Literature
Writing Architecture and
3 Beyond Cyberpunk the Body
New Critical Perspectives Laura Colombino
Edited by Graham J. Murphy
and Sherryl Vint 10 Diseases and Disorders in
Contemporary Fiction
4 Criticism, Crisis, and The Syndrome Syndrome
Contemporary Narrative Edited by T.J. Lustig and
Textual Horizons in an Age of James Peacock
Global Risk
Edited by Paul Crosthwaite 11 Identity and Form in
Contemporary Literature
5 Food and Culture in Edited by Ana María
Contemporary American Sánchez-Arce
Fiction
Lorna Piatti-Farnell 12 The Vampire in Contemporary
Popular Literature
6 Intertextual and Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Interdisciplinary Approaches to
Cormac McCarthy 13 Religion in Cormac
Borders and Crossing McCarthy’s Fiction
Edited by Nicholas Monk with Apocryphal Borderlands
a Foreword by Rick Wallach Manuel Broncano
7 Global Issues in Contemporary 14 The Ethics and Aesthetics of
Hispanic Women’s Writing Vulnerability in Contemporary
Shaping Gender, the British Fiction
Environment, and Politics Jean-Michel Ganteau
Edited by María Cibreiro and
Francisca López
The Ethics and Aesthetics of
Vulnerability in Contemporary
British Fiction
Jean-Michel Ganteau
First published 2015
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
The right of Jean-Michel Ganteau to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ganteau, Jean-Michel.
The ethics and aesthetics of vulnerability in contemporary British fiction / Jean-Michel
Ganteau. — First edition.
pages cm. — (Routledge studies in contemporary literature ; #14)
Includes index.
1. English fiction—21st century—History and criticism. 2. British literature—
20th century—History and criticism. 3. Vulnerability (Personality trait) in literature.
4. Ethics in literature. 5. Aesthetics in literature. I. Title.
PR890.V85G36 2015
823’.9209353—dc23 2015002413
ISBN: 978-1-138-90372-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-69669-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
“Bien sûr,
Je connais tes plaies, tes blessures”
E. D.
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 Romance Strategies 35
2 Elegy 69
3 Ghost Texts 100
4 State of the Nation 132
Conclusion 166
Index 175
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Acknowledgements
For their consistent support, inspiring suggestions and feedback, attentive
re-reading, and generosity I would like to thank very warmly Marc Amfreville,
Isabelle Alfandary, Catherine Bernard, Geneviève Brisac, Laurent Mellet,
Susana Onega, Christine Reynier, and Pierre Vitoux. My thanks also
go to the students in my Master 2 seminar on narrative poetics for their
engagement with the texts that I submitted to their scrutiny and for some
of their thought-provoking readings. And, of course, working on this proj-
ect would have been impossible without the intellectual stimulation and
financial backing of the EA 741-EMMA research team at the Université
Paul-Valéry, Montpellier, without the intellectual stimulation provided by
the ARTE seminar on the representation of trauma at the Sorbonne, and
without the inspiring projects developed by the Société d’Etudes Anglaises
Contemporaines.
I would like to thank the editors of the journal Etudes britanniques con-
temporaines for their kind permission to let me reproduce part of my article
on Nicholas Royle’s Quilt.