Title With the witnesses : poetry, compassion, and claimed experience / Dale Tracy

Published Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017

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Description 1 online resource Contents A contagious notion of trauma -- Community and poetry's maps -- Compassion across contexts : substitution, incorporation, and juxtaposition -- Accumulating suffering : waiting without end -- Signing skeletons : relational structures of the actual and artistic Summary "Trauma theory dominates contemporary ideas about ethical response to suffering. Yet, trauma theory, as it has been adopted by literary and cultural studies, has harmful effects. In With the Witnesses, Dale Tracy argues that poetry's compassionate strategies offer an alternative approach to engaging not only suffering in art but suffering in general. Emphasizing inaccessible histories, unspeakable suffering, and unconscious witnessing, trauma theory leads readers to claim others' suffering through empathic identification. Understood through trauma theory, witness poetry--poetry responding to social suffering--appears to make traumatic traces contagiously available to readers. With the Witnesses interrogates this metaphoric logic in which readers identify with a speaker, placing themselves into the position of witness. Instead, Tracy finds that witness poems follow a metonymic logic: contiguity rather than substitution, nearness rather than likeness, and waiting in relationship rather than claiming understanding. Compassion means feeling with--not as--another. Poems responding to diverse national and transnational contexts of atrocity, conflict, and marginalization guide With the Witnesses outside of existing frameworks into compassionate response to suffering. With the Witnesses follows each poem as a unique theory of compassion and arrives at a place where a witness can stand with those who suffer without standing in for them."-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Subject Poetry, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism. Memory in literature. Witnesses in literature. Suffering in literature. Psychic trauma in literature. Self-disclosure in literature. BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary. LITERARY CRITICISM -- Semiotics & Theory. Memory in literature Poetry, Modern Psychic trauma in literature Self-disclosure in literature Suffering in literature Witnesses in literature Genre/Form Electronic books Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 9780773550292 0773550291 9780773550308 0773550305 9780773550285 0773550283 9780773550278 0773550275

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