Ghost, Android, Animal: Trauma and Literature Beyond the Human

by Tony M Vinci

Ghost, Android, Animal challenges the notion that trauma literature functions as a healing agent for victims of severe pain and loss by bringing trauma studies into the orbit of posthumanist thought. Investigating how literary representations of ghosts, androids, and animals engage traumatic experience, this book revisits canonical texts by William Faulkner and Toni Morrison and aligns them with experimental and popular texts by Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, and Clive Barker. In establishing this textual field, the book reveals how depictions of non-human agents invite readers to cross subjective and cultural thresholds and interact with the "impossible" pain of others. Ultimately, this study asks us to consider new practices for reading trauma literature that enlarges our conceptions of the human and the real.

218 pages, Hardcover

Published November 21, 2019

Reviews

[Giulia93 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a challenging reading. It gives little to no background when it comes to the literary texts analyzed and the analysis proceeds as if the texts were considered common knowledge by the author. Considering the already dense content of the book, a bit more context for the literary part would have helped readers who are first approaching and might not have read these texts. For the rest, the author makes a strong case for the blurring of boundaries between the human and its nonhuman others in order to recognize their traumas and sufferings. However, in some chapters, it seems as if the focus of the author is still on the suffering of the human mediated through, rather than connected to, the sufferings of the nonhuman others. This changes in the last chapter where the author deals exclusively with the traumas and sufferings of animal others. The book is indeed a useful reading as it positions literary and posthumanist studies in direct discussion with literary studies so it will prove an essential work for scholars in all these three fields.

[ASC Library]

809 Vin