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'My Skin, a Parchme...
'My Skin, a Parchment of Tales' : Trauma, Wounding and the Postapartheid Gothic in Terry Westby-Nunn's Sea of Wise Insects
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- Duncan, Rebecca (author)
- Independent,Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
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(creator_code:org_t)
- Taylor & Francis, 2013
- 2013
- English.
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In: Current Writing. - : Taylor & Francis. - 1013-929X .- 2159-9130. ; 25:1, s. 76-87
- Related links:
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https://urn.kb.se/re...
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https://doi.org/10.1...
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Abstract
Subject headings
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- In this paper, I read Terry Westby-Nunn's The Sea of Wise Insects as an example of the literary mode identified increasingly by scholars as South African postcolonial Gothic. In line with existing research, I work from a definition of the gothic genre which casts it as highly culturally specific and shaped by the anxieties of the society in which it arises. In Westby-Nunn's narrative these fears are enmeshed in the South African past, and revolve, more specifically, around the extent to which history's bearing on the present has become a dangerous point of repression. My argument traces a transgenerational logic of traumatic transmission, which situates the unspoken crimes of an old generation at the psychic nerve-centre of Westby-Nunn's contemporary protagonist, a strategy which disrupts any illusion of a stable boundary between the injustice of ‘then’ and the liberation of ‘now’. Finally, I suggest that through the deployment of an aesthetic which draws on the gothic sub-genre of horror-writing, Westby-Nunn develops a narrative which, to paraphrase Tabish Khair, does not operate “only in words”. Instead, the text relies in part on visceral reader reactions so that the novel admits of silence in a way that avoids replicating the exclusionary logic underpinning the institutionalised discrimination in South Africa's history.
Subject headings
- HUMANIORA -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturstudier (hsv//swe)
- HUMANITIES -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Literatures (hsv//eng)
Keyword
- postcolonial
- gothic
- horror
- post-apartheid
- trauma
- wounding
- patriarchy
- Comparative literature
- Litteraturvetenskap
Publication and Content Type
- ref (subject category)
- art (subject category)
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