With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience

by Dale Tracy

Overview

While trauma theory has been adopted by contemporary literary and cultural studies as an ethical way to study depictions of suffering, there is a risk that its present use could cause more harm than good. By emphasizing inaccessible histories, unspeakable suffering, and unconscious witnessing, trauma theory may lead readers to claim others’ suffering through empathic identification. In With the Witnesses, Dale Tracy argues that poetry offers an alternative approach to engage with not only suffering in art but suffering in general. Examining the strategies of witness poetry, Tracy interrogates and reformulates the dominant models of trauma studies in which readers take over the witnessing position by identifying with the speaker as a witness. If the purpose of reading such poetry is to contribute to a chain of witnesses, what is the distinct role of a reader, and how does it differ from the role of the poem’s speaker? Tracy proposes that metonymy – a logic of nearness rather than likeness – is compassion’s formal manifestation. Analyzing poetry that emphasizes the contiguity of metonymy over the substitution of metaphor, she attends to the positions into which witnessing speakers invite readers. Poems that respond to diverse national and transnational contexts of atrocity, conflict, and marginalization guide With the Witnesses toward a compassionate response to suffering that involves feeling with – not as – another. Following each poem as a unique theory of compassion, With the Witnesses demonstrates that poems hold suffering signed as art, not claimable traces of suffering.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780773550308
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	06/09/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	358 KB

About the Author

Dale Tracy is assistant adjunct professor in the Department of English at the Royal Military College of Canada.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 3

Part 1 Trauma and Compassion

1 A Contagious Notion of Trauma 33

Part 2 Compassion and Representation

2 Community and Poetry's Maps 75

3 Compassion across Contexts: Substitution, Incorporation, and Juxtaposition 119

Part 3 Witness in Social and Artistic Structures

4 Accumulating Suffering: Waiting without End 159

5 Signing Skeletons: Relational Structures of the Actual and Artistic 199

Conclusion 239

Notes 247

Bibliography 267

Index 279

Editorial Reviews

?With the Witnesses is a significant scholarly contribution in its consideration of important poetry and its engagement with important research in the field.? Aimee Pozorski, Central Connecticut State University


?A compelling study of poetry that witnesses and responds to the anguish caused by historical traumas, With the Witnesses is consistently fascinating and richly provocative.? Nicholas Bradley, University of Victoria

From the Publisher