Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel in English, ed.

2009

The aggressive and violating content of Transgressive Fiction has driven numerous critics and literary theorists to try to examine the appeal of subversive fiction. Within these attempts critics find it necessary to justify the texts content by assigning it some value which is presented in the form of a cathartic logic; namely that Transgressive texts have explorative and cathartic potential. In her 2011 publication, Aggressive Fiction: Reading the Contemporary American Novel, Kathryn Hume makes the comment that when reading subversive texts, “To the degree that we are willing to let our conditioned barriers down, we can experience vicariously the sense of freedom that discarding that training might produce.”1 However, what readers respond to is not the monstrous content, but rather the texts confrontation with a monstrous silence. Silence and monstrosity are linked by a lack or void of information and Transgressive texts are filled with confronting voids which overwhelm and undermine the grotesque content. These silences are created by several areas of textuality. Firstly eroticism (the culmination of violence and sexuality), is silent and on the body and cannot be explored by the textual medium. This is followed by the fact that abjection and jouissance induced by the text are created by the symbolic order and therefore only relate to the level of the sign, rather than actual experience. Lastly, the silence that these texts highlight is the void created by the symbolic order which both constructs and alienates the reading subject.

2011

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 1991

Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak, 2023

This chapter provides a critical overview and a theoretical introduction to Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives and considerations on silence through a broad diversity of themes and functions, this introductory essay reclaims an unprecedented attentiveness to the unspoken in today’s Irish fiction. The chapter argues that in Irish contemporary writing silence features as multivalent and multifaceted: it can function as a form of resistance, a strategy of defiance, empowerment and emancipation, but also a way of covering up stories which remain untold and invisible, thus distorting or directly concealing inconvenient truths from the public eye. Ultimately, as the book itself demonstrates, for contemporary Irish writers, the unspoken is not just a constraint but a productive site of enquiry, a silence that “speaks”.

2016

This thesis discusses female silence, voice and representation as portrayed in four postcolonial novels written by Asian female writers or those from the Asian diaspora. The novels included in the corpus are The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo, Brick Lane by Monica Ali and Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne. This thesis aims to explore the different strategies adopted by the authors to represent different forms of silence of the type highlighted in theoretical work by Spivak, Olsen and Showalter. The novels analysed open up new contexts in which issues of silence, migration, displacement and multiculturalism, which are central in postcolonial literature, are explored. In its examination of these issues in detail, the thesis has been influenced by postcolonial and diasporic studies, with a focus on women's issues and feminist thought. Instead of focusing on the role of silence solely in relation to specific characters, the thesis attempts to engage with the complex ways in which these narratives represent various forms, moments and scenes of silence. From the analysis, we can exemplify that the novels can also be used to suggest the ambivalences of speaking/not-speaking via the narrative representations of silence. Authorial silence involves the author's deliberate refusal to speak directly in the text ; instead, the author utilises several literary devices to convey something indirectly to the reader. Silence is also linked to concepts such as shame, secrets and gossip. One is likely to refrain from speaking if he or she is ashamed, secretive or is the topic of gossip in one's community. There are also some female characters who are portrayed as not-speaking, or choosing to remain silent so as not to cause problems for the family. A few other characters have been portrayed as refusing to speak out as they have been traumatised into silence. Lastly, women can also be complicit in holding on to patriarchal structures and in the process, attempt to speak out in order to to silence or to cause problems to other women.

Routledge eBooks, 2021

Texts with No Words: The Communication of Speechlessness, 2018

Speechlessness is one of the main concerns in the works of the American author Jonathan Safran Foer. This article shows how Foer's short story A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease(2002) supports the reading of his novels Everything is Illuminated(2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close(2005), and Here I Am(2016) when it comes to motives of speechlessness, silence, and blank spaces –in a metaphorical as well as material sense. The short story proposes a system of signs that is expected to help with the expression of what per definition cannot be put into words. With refer-ence to poststructuralist literary theory (Derrida, Hayles, West-Pavlov, Westphal), the article demonstrates how A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Diseaseand Foer's novels philosophically address fundamental problems of language regarding its 'mediatedness'.

This paper explores the idea that silences are an important defining element of art. When this concept is applied to literary art, readers can understand unwritten parts, or lack in information, as the "silences" of literature. These silences can be used to further EFL literature discussions, by requiring students to speculate and question about author's decisions to use "silences" in literature. The act of questioning is exercising critical thinking and furthering facilitation abilities, both crucial skills for students, teachers-in-training, and current teachers.

2011

Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic" distributions of the sensible," which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière's corpus, the ...