The Body of the Postmodernist Narrator: Between Violence and Artistry
Author: Fatima Festić
Date Of Publication: May 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0520-9
Isbn: 1-4438-0520-3
The goal of this book is to elaborate the theoretical framework with regard to reading postmodern fiction from the perspective of the bodies of their narrators as textual occurrences.

It centers on Lacanian psychoanalysis and the intersection between its various political interpretations and feminist theories. The emphasis is on the register of the real, on the domain of trauma as it appears in contemporary world, literature and history and on attempts at artistic resolution of its consequences. Since postmodernism is widely interpreted as a Western phenomenon, the book tries to show its dependence on much broader spatial, political, cultural and ideological dimensions, taking as index the darker side of literature, such as murder and destruction, dark courses of desire and the repercussions of their externalization in the reality of life.

Focusing on the conditions that link contemporary cultures to the narratives and narrators’ bodies, the book exposes the potential of bodies revealed in the act of narrating and the ambiguities of their fictionalizing and subjectivizing aspects, taking the body as the site of repressed knowledge, traumas, resistance and manipulative desires. The analysis of the fictional works aims to point out a missing link between imagination and the real historical conditions from which imagination derives as well as the discursive struggle to save the tormented, territorialized body from the prismatic world by holding to the “absent referent” and prevent violence caused by the uncritical “pleasure principle”.

Fatima Festić has worked as a Professor, Lecturer and Research Fellow at various universities in USA, Europe, South Africa, Turkey. She is currently working on her third and fourth book – on politicization of horror and on gender and trauma. She published more than 40 articles pertaining to literary, psychoanalytic and feminist theory/criticism, semiotics and cultural studies.

“Literature is fiction! However literature speaks of real murders and genocides. This is one of the basis of magic realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s novels. Then, what is fiction? The question is crucial particularly when one thinks that media and official discourses often deny genocides. René Girard focusing of the victimization process and the invention of scapegoats insists on the fact that mythical narratives speak of real murders and real violence. And the site of real violence is the body. Hence, literature connects violence, the body, the other and desire. These elements are the main focus of Fatima Festic in The Body of the Postmodernist Narrator. Reading Christa Wolf, J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, D.M. Thomas and an impressive number of theoreticians, Fatima Festic focuses on the place of the narrator and on the body as the place of repressed knowledge, traumas, resistance and manipulation of desires. Through her capacity to read trans-culturally different texts, she is able to focus on important dynamic in postmodern writing. For example on the performativity of texts which emphasizes the split inherent in subject, agent and author, that of the horrible, the abject as precised by Jacques Lacan. Thanks to her reading, Fatima Festić also transforms the critical and theoretical text, her text, into a performative text. It is based upon a speech act which is a promise. The promise is that the body of the victim will not have been thrown into a mass grave and lost in universal oblivion.”

- Patrick Imbert, Professor at the University of Ottawa and President of the Academy of Arts and Humanities of the Royal Society of Canada

“Fatima Festić’s innovative, personal, feminist and exemplary scholarly approach to literary theories relating to violence, trauma and the body, sheds new light on important texts from Wolf to Coetzee, Rushdie and others.  In our chaotic, frightening world, she brilliantly gives us Hope against all hopes!”

- Evelyne Accad, Professor Emerita, University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign

“Fatima Festić explores an important subject in her examination of the liminal space between violence and artistry in terms of the body of postmodernist narrators. She discusses the externalization of the darker forces of desire in this context and the spaces between modernism and postmodernism. The issues of closeness and alienation and subjectivity and otherness arise in this discussion. This book ranges from novels such as Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe to Salman Rushdie’s Shame and D. M. Thomas’ The White Hotel with an eye to the vital question of the human body. Festić presents significant insights on recognition and knowledge as key aspects of the relation between sexuality and the body. That body in narration becomes a crux in this study because it is the locus of repressed knowledge. Trauma and desire are central topics in Festić’s contribution to the theory and practice of literary and cultural studies and to a number of fields across the humanities and social sciences. The connexion between literature and everyday life is also at the heart of this book. The split in author, agent and subject and its relation to trauma concerns Festić, who has written a provocative, thoughtful and accomplished work.”

- Jonathan Hart, Professor of English, Comparative Literature and History, University of Alberta

“This is a fascinating collection of essays on gender and trauma across history, nations and the disciplines. Violence as both product and process links war, genocide from 16th century South America to 20th century Europe and Asia, mastectomies, slavery, rape, pornography and refugee camps. This is a book that should be used in the interdisciplinary classroom to teach students how violence structures gendered, racial and sexual identities. It illustrates from a number of different angles how memory narratives break the silence around atrocities and create communities where before traumatized individuals had thought they were alone. The reader learns how the telling of an individual story stands in for collectively shared pain and allows mourning to play its role in therapy.”

—Miriam Cooke, Professor, Duke University

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