Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel
in English. Newcastle-upon-Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2009. 290p.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-1247-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1247-4
Price UK : £39.99
Price US : $59.99
http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Voices-and-Silence-in-the-Contemporary-Novel-in-English1-4438-1247-1.htm
This volume examines the various processes at work in expressing
silence and excessive speech in contemporary novels in English, covering
the whole spectrum from effusiveness to muteness. Even if in the postmodern
episteme language is deemed inadequate for speaking the unspeakable,
contemporary authors still rely on voice as a mode of representation
and a performative tool, and exploit silence not only as a sign of
absence, block or withdrawal, but also as a token of presence and
resistance. Logorrhoea and reticence are not necessarily antithetical
as compulsive verbosity may work as a smokescreen to sidestep the
real issues, while silences and gaps may reveal more than they hide.
By submitting their texts to both expansion and retention, hypertrophy
and aphasia, writers persistently test the limits of language and
its ability to make sense of individual and collective stories. The
present volume analyses the complex poetics of silence and speech
in fiction from the 1960's to the present, with special focus on Will
Self, Graham Swift, John Fowles, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jenny Diski, Lionel
Shriver, Michèle Roberts, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Safran
Foer, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Jamaica Kincaid,
Ryhaan Shah and J.M. Coetzee.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction
So Many Words, So Little Said
Vanessa Guignery
Part I: Will Self or the Language of Resistance
Chapter One
Radical No-Saying. The Contradictions and Paradoxes of the Will/Self
Didier Girard
Chapter Two
Demotic English in The Book of Dave
Will Self
Chapter Three
Conversation with Will Self
Part II: Graham Swift "in between the lines"
Chapter Four
Graham Swift's Vocal Silences
Laurence Tatarian
Chapter Five
Passing Over in Silence: Towards Quietism in Graham Swift's Shuttlecock
Ben Winsworth
Chapter Six
"You cross a line": Reticence and Excess in Graham Swift's
The Light of Day
Pascale Tollance
Chapter Seven
Graham Swift's Tomorrow, or the Devious Art of Procrastination
Isabelle Roblin
Part III: Reticence and Logorrhoea in Contemporary British and
American Literature
Chapter Eight
So many Silent Voices, which are mine? (Jenny Diski)
Nicole Terrien
Chapter Nine
From Logorrhoea to Silence in John Fowles's The Collector
Sonia Saubion
Chapter Ten
Filling in what was Left out: Voices and Silences of Biblical Women
Ingrid Bertrand
Chapter Eleven
Breaking the Silence and Camouflaging Voices in Lionel Shriver's We
Need to Talk About Kevin
Monica Latham
Chapter Twelve
Making the Voice Wordless in A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo
Ishiguro
Hélène Fau
Chapter Thirteen
The Translation of Testimony and the Transmission of Trauma: Jonathan
Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and Liev Schreiber's
Film Adaptation
Annette Kern-Stähler and Axel Stähler
Part IV: New Literatures: The Poetics of Silent Voices
Chapter Fourteen
Voices Lost, Voices Regained in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small
Things
Vanessa Guignery
Chapter Fifteen
Cries and Whispers: Voice in Roy's and Rushdie's Novels
Elsa Sacksick
Chapter Sixteen
Salman Rushdie's Art of Sentencing the Excess
Cécile Girardin
Chapter Seventeen
Still Life and Performance Art: The Erotics of Silence and Excess
in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and Zadie Smith's On Beauty
Christina Mesa
Chapter Eighteen
Ryhaan Shah's Silent Screams of A Silent Life
Judith Misrahi-Barak
Chapter Nineteen
The Silent Ghostly I-figure in Coetzee's Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial
Life and the Grotesque Writing of an Unnameable Secret
Geneviève Ducros
Chapter Twenty
Resisting History, Resisting Story: J.M. Coetzee's The Life and
Times of Michael K
Bozena Kucala