{"title":"Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)","authors":"Sarah Busch, Heidi Lucja Liedke","doi":"10.1515/zaa-2024-2013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2024-2013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines how theatre works as a form of therapy using Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon. Both depict fictional representations of psychotherapy but also use concepts from narrative therapy as developed by White and Epston (1990), such as the audience as witnesses and creators of their own story. We argue that therapy-as-theatre exerts a pull on the audience, which invites them to empathize, identify and understand, and draws them into the “affective arrangement” of the plays as defined by Slaby, Mühlhoff, and Wüschner (2019). The two plays bring together the therapeutic and the theatrical both in terms of content and form: in Every Brilliant Thing, the performer explicitly re-enacts conversations with a counsellor and mimics the therapy setting by sharing with the audience their feelings concerning the suicide of their mother. Similarly, in An Octoroon, the playwright’s alter ego BJJ makes himself vulnerable to the audience. However, the play also confronts spectators with hard truths about the history and topicality of racism that they may not be prepared to hear. Within the specific time frame of the shows, similar to the frame of a psychotherapy session, the two plays create self-contained affective spaces where feelings and emotions circulate between performers, spectators and among audience members.","PeriodicalId":293840,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik","volume":"5 4","pages":"179 - 192"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141406816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thresholds of In/Visibility and the Scopic Power of Literature","authors":"Françoise Král","doi":"10.1515/zaa-2023-2040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2040","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In recent years the trope of invisibility has emerged as a critical concept in the humanities; initially associated with the issue of racial invisibility, it has been applied to all forms of marginalisation, be they racial, social, or political. Today, the context of hypervisibility, which results from intensive media coverage of certain events, has made discussing invisibility paradoxical. This article seeks to reassess invisibility as a key concept in the humanities and discusses the scopic power of literature to make the unseen visible. This will be approached via discussion of contemporary narratives dealing with disappearance and loss, with a particular focus on the literature of the middle passage.","PeriodicalId":293840,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik","volume":"28 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140271848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sherronda J. Brown: Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture","authors":"Kristina Weber","doi":"10.1515/zaa-2023-2035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2035","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":293840,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik","volume":"88 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140271701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Experience(s) of Decorporation: The Invisibilisation of Care in John Lanchester’s Capital (2012)","authors":"Alice Borrego","doi":"10.1515/zaa-2023-2042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2042","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In The Ethics of Care (2006), Virginia Held underlines that care cannot be conceived without recognising our interdependence and responsibility for one another. Despite recent efforts to divide our society between private and public spheres, no such clear delimitation is possible in the ethics of care. Yet, as the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, the neoliberal financialisation of healthcare systems is redefining our ability to look after others. John Lanchester’s ‘crunch lit’ novel Capital (2012) draws attention to what I call “experiences of decorporation”: the vulnerable ageing body and the medical system both become victims of a market-logic which invisibilises the cared for, the carer, and the caring. Taking place on a single street in London, the metonymic construction of the novel calls for an analysis of how the illness and death of Petunia Howe, the oldest resident on Pepys Road, is symptomatic of the ethical effacement of the body politic under the clout of neoliberal politics.","PeriodicalId":293840,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik","volume":"86 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140278303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Poetics of (Un)Mournability: Emma Donoghue’s Hood (1995) as an Elegy in Invisible Ink","authors":"Héloïse Lecomte","doi":"10.1515/zaa-2023-2041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2041","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Emma Donoghue’s Hood is an Irish tale of closeted lesbian love in which the narrator cannot mourn the death of her partner publicly because of the compulsory social invisibility of their relationship. While in her monograph Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Judith Butler correlates the (un)grievability of certain lives (their ability to be grieved over) with ethical frames of perception, this paper focuses on the invisibilisation of public mourning. Since the term “mourning” is often used to evoke public displays and rituals of grief, I propose to confront Butler’s concept of “(un)grievability” with what I call “(un)mournability,” in order to investigate the three metaphors of (in)visibility that shape the aesthetics of Donoghue’s contemporary narrative elegy. The images of the closet, the hood, and the invisible ink, which are instrumental to Donoghue’s narrative strategies of linguistic invisibility, map out the evolving representation of lesbian invisibility in the novel.","PeriodicalId":293840,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik","volume":"392 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140280422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Becoming (In)Visible: Self-Assertion and Disappearance of the Self in Contemporary Surveillance Narratives","authors":"Betiel Wasihun","doi":"10.1515/zaa-2023-2043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2043","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Visible surveillance technologies are vanishing in the wake of dataveillance. The practice of surveillance is certainly not disappearing, but it has become inconspicuous. In a regime of invisible surveillance, the watchers and the watched alike are hard to identify, for the latter have also become socially invisible as human beings. I argue that the idea of becoming invisible in both digital and pre-digital surveillance societies is multifaceted. On the one hand, it suggests total deprivation of personal autonomy as a result of overexposure resulting in the disappearance of the subject and, on the other hand, it implies a possibility of resistance and self-assertion. Self-exposure is taken to extremes in Dave Eggers’s dystopian novel The Circle (2013) where the protagonist becomes the centre of attention in a “viewer society” (Mathiesen 1997) and “goes transparent” (Eggers 2013, 351). In contrast, Wolfgang Hilbig’s Stasi novel “Ich” (1993) works with different notions of invisibility. Recruited to spy for the Stasi, Hilbig’s protagonist – an unsuccessful poet – is at the same time targeted by East Germany’s secret police and wants to become invisible, hiding from the omnipresent Stasi surveillance in Berlin’s maze-like cellar corridors in an attempt of self-assertion. The comparison of these novels will elucidate how different discourses on (in)visibility and transparency contribute to an account of subjectivity that attempts to resist surveillance.","PeriodicalId":293840,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik","volume":"19 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140272640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ina Bergmann: The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction","authors":"Michael Butter","doi":"10.1515/zaa-2023-2038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2038","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":293840,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik","volume":"245 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140271047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marlon Lieber: Reading Race Relationally: Embodied Dispositions and Social Structures in Colson Whitehead’s Novels","authors":"Valentina López Liendo","doi":"10.1515/zaa-2023-2037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2037","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":293840,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik","volume":"17 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140269409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Perced to the Roote’: Refugee Tales and the Poetics of In/Visibility","authors":"Sibylle Baumbach","doi":"10.1515/zaa-2023-2044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2044","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In their aim to give a voice to those that are unheard and unseen in society, to refugees and detainees, Refugee Tales aim at countering practices of invisibilisation, especially in connection with UK immigration politics. While this might suggest a focus on narrative as a tool for communicating the untold, Refugee Tales I–IV (2016–2021) exceed this important, yet unsurprising role of narrative by unfolding the ‘making’ of invisibility. This is suggested, for instance, by the politics of adaptation and the in/visible intertext The Canterbury Tales, or by the (productive) paradox that most tales are in fact ‘translations’ penned by renowned writers, such as David Herd, Patience Agbabi, or Ali Smith. This article explores the poetics of invisibility in Refugee Tales by examining their specific (attentional) design. As I argue, these tales draw on tensions of in/visibility to unveil key instances of inattentional blindness in literature, culture, and society, challenging the relation between the seen and the unseen, between what is considered visible or invisible.","PeriodicalId":293840,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik","volume":"108 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140274846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sara Ahmed: The Feminist Killjoy Handbook","authors":"Lena Mattheis","doi":"10.1515/zaa-2023-2036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2036","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":293840,"journal":{"name":"Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik","volume":"1 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140270342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}