Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning

by Nouri Gana

Overview

By remapping the configurations of mourning across modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial literatures, psychoanalysis and deconstruction (James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Elias Khoury, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida), Signifying Loss studies not only how loss is signified but also the ethico-political significance of such signifying. First, by examining the dynamics between narrative tropes and mourning, it elaborates a poetics of narrative mourning in which prosopopoeia becomes the master trope of mourning while catachresis the master trope of melancholia and chiasmus of trauma. Second, it develops a situated and flexible theory of mourning, capable of adjusting to diverse contexts in which the ethical and political stakes of mourning are different-in short, Signifying Loss calls for the formulation of geopolitical and differential tactics of mourning and mournability rather that for a clear cut strategy of inconsolability.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611480344
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	01/20/2011
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Nouri Gana is assistant professor of comparative literature and Near Eastern languages and cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Poetics of Mourning 9

Acknowledgments 17

1 Thresholds of Mourning: Freud and After 21

2 Horizons of Desire, Horizons of Mourning: Joyce's Dubliners 47

3 The Vicissitudes of Melancholia in Freud and Joyce 72

4 Kincaid's Claim: The Poetics and Politics of Melancholia 90

5 The Ineluctable Modality of "Posthumous Infidelity": The Ethics of Mourning in Kincaid, Derrida, and Ben Jelloun 122

6 Formless Form: Elias Khoury's City Gates and the Poetics of Trauma 153

Coda: The Politics of Mourning 179

Notes 183

Bibliography 208

Index 219

Editorial Reviews

Signifying Loss is a bold, ambitious, and strikingly original book. Its theoretical goal is to demonstrate the compatibility of three modes of interpreting literary narratives of mourning and melancholy that are often seen as mutually exclusive: psychoanalytic (Freud, Derrida, and others), tropological or rhetorical (De Man and others), and postcolonial (Fanon and others). Using all three of these approaches in interlaced simultaneity, Gana presents brilliantly original readings of James Joyce's Dubliners, Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother and My Brother, Taher Ben Jelloun's The Last Friend, and Elias Khoury's City Gates, along with other work by these authors. Many theorists are also penetratingly discussed along the way: Fanon, Benjamin, Deleuze, de Man, Lyotard, Glissant, Spivak, and others. Signifying Loss is a challenging book at the frontier of current theory as well as of literary and postcolonial study. It will, I am confident, be widely read.

J Hillis Miller

Mourning may “become” Derrida, but mourning has become, in Gana’s superb analysis of this psychic and literary process, history—not just the history of modernism, but also that of our present, marked as it is by violence, trauma and colonialism. Drawing upon the best of Theory (Derrida, de Man, Butler, Spivak, Santner) and the best of psychoanalysis (Freud, Winnicott, Kristeva, Lacan), Gana provides both a synthesis of contemporary views on mourning and an exemplary reappraisal of Joyce, Kincaid, Ben Jelloun and Khoury.

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Gana masterfully orchestrates his many theoretical sources, keeping them subordinate to his own consistently original argument. His conceptual inventiveness is remarkable, yet—what a rarity!—his prose is as visceral as it is theoretical. He elaborates a poetics of mourning, translating it into terms of such figures as catachresis and prosopopeia; yet he never forgets that what is at stake in the movements of mourning figurality is affect of the most profound sort. Gana's important book shows that the relatively new field of mourning studies is rich in implications for postcolonial criticism.

Henry Staten

Signifying Loss is a timely intervention in theory, especially as its final chapters extend the territory of postcolonial mourning into Arabic literature. For those interested in the productive cross-roads of postcolonial studies and traumatic losses, I would highly recommend this text as well as other recent publications by Gana. Given the war-zone and ethical blindness of this post-9/11 decade, Signifying Loss is a theoretical intervention, which defines the postcolonial, not as periphery, but the postmodern center.

Comparative Literature

Mourning may “become” Derrida, but mourning has become, in Gana’s superb analysis of this psychic and literary process, history—not just the history of modernism, but also that of our present, marked as it is by violence, trauma and colonialism. Drawing upon the best of Theory (Derrida, de Man, Butler, Spivak, Santner) and the best of psychoanalysis (Freud, Winnicott, Kristeva, Lacan), Gana provides both a synthesis of contemporary views on mourning and an exemplary reappraisal of Joyce, Kincaid, Ben Jelloun and Khoury.

Jean-Michel Rabaté