The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine) - Softcover

Filippaki, Iro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3030676323 ISBN 13: 9783030676322

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

Synopsis

The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature provides an interdisciplinary exploration in early medical trauma treatment and the emergent postmodern canon of the 1960s and 1970s. By identifying key postmodern literary tropes (paranoia, uncanniness, biomediation) as products of an overarching post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) narrative paradigm, this concise study reveals unexplored aspects of the canonical novels at hand—such as the link between individual and collective traumatization—highlights the presence of epic elements in postmodern narratives, and identifies the influence of emerging psychiatric treatment on the post-WWII novels at hand. Performing a medical humanities reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), this book introduces a novel way of examining trauma at the intersection of narrative, history, and medicine and recalibrates the importance of postmodern politics of transformation, while making the case for an aesthetics of trauma. By examining the historico-political developments that dictated the formation of PTSD in the wake of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, this book argues that the perception of PTSD symptoms directly influenced aesthetic and literary tropes of the Cold War era.

About this title

About the Author

Iro Filippaki is an independent researcher working on trauma, affect studies, narratology, medicine, and war. She is the general editor of Tendon, a medical humanities creative journal, and is also on the editorial board of De Gryuter’s Video Games and Humanities series. She has taught English Literature, Comparative Literature, and Critical Writing at the University of Glasgow, and medical humanities courses at Johns Hopkins University where she was a postdoctoral fellow until July 2020. She currently resides in and writes from Athens, Greece.

From the Back Cover

The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature provides an interdisciplinary exploration in early medical trauma treatment and the emergent postmodern canon of the 1960s and 1970s. By identifying key postmodern literary tropes (paranoia, uncanniness, biomediation) as products of an overarching post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) narrative paradigm, this concise study reveals unexplored aspects of the canonical novels at hand―such as the link between individual and collective traumatization―highlights the presence of epic elements in postmodern narratives, and identifies the influence of emerging psychiatric treatment on the post-WWII novels at hand. Performing a medical humanities reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), this book introduces a novel way of examining trauma at the intersection of narrative, history, and medicine and recalibrates the importance of postmodern politics of transformation, while making the case for an aesthetics of trauma. By examining the historico-political developments that dictated the formation of PTSD in the wake of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, this book argues that the perception of PTSD symptoms directly influenced aesthetic and literary tropes of the Cold War era.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2022
• ISBN 10: 3030676323
• ISBN 13: 9783030676322
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120