Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Psychoanalysis and Culture)

Focuses on the role of shame and trauma as it looks at issues of race, class, color, and caste in the novels of Toni Morrison. Quiet As It’s Kept draws on and extends recent psychoanalytic and psychiatric work of shame and trauma theorists to offer an in-depth analysis of Toni Morrison’s representation of painful and shameful race matters in her fiction. Providing a frank and sustained look at the troubling, if not distressing, aspects of Morrison’s fiction that other critics have studiously avoided or minimized in their commentaries, this book challenges established views of Morrison, showing her to be an author who forces readers into uncomfortable confrontations with matters of race. In Quiet As It’s Kept, J. Brooks Bouson explores these issues in Morrison’s works The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Morrison, Nobel prize-winning author, has viewed part of her cultural and literary task as a writer to bear witness to the plight of black Americans. “Quiet as it’s kept, much of our business, our existence here, has been grotesque. It really has,” she has commented. As she exposes to public view sensitive race matters in her fiction, Morrison presents jarring depictions of the trauma of slavery and the horrors of racist oppression and black-on-black violence.

Biographies & Memoirs

Bouson, J. Brooks

Community & Culture

State University of New York Press

Quiet As It's Kept draws on and extends recent psychoanalytic and psychiatric work of shame and trauma theorists to offer an in-depth analysis of Toni Morrison's representation of painful and shameful race matters in her fiction. Providing a frank and sustained look at the troubling, if not distressing, aspects of Morrison's fiction that other critics have studiously avoided or minimized in their commentaries, this book challenges established views of Morrison, showing her to be an author who forces readers into uncomfortable confrontations with matters of race. In Quiet As It's Kept, J. Brooks Bouson explores these issues in Morrison's works The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise.

In a series of important studies, American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut focused attention on a fundamental aspect of human behavior: the desire each person feels for a sense of relationship with and empathic responsiveness from others. This book offers the first sustained application of Kohut's work to the study of literature and sheds new light on the complex nature of interactions between texts and readers. J. Brooks Bouson investigates nine representative "narcissistic" characters from works by Atwood, Bellow, Conrad, Dotosevsky, Kafka, Lessing, Mann, and Woolf. Combining a careful examination of individual characters and texts with an analysis of the critical commentaries they have generated, Bouson makes us aware of the narcissistic dramas encoded in texts, dramas that are often unconsciously replicated by critics in their interpretive narratives. "In an essential way," Bouson writes, "the meaning of literary work grows out of the empathic event that occurs between the reader and the text." The book establishes a place for Kohut's self psychology in the study of literature and provides a refreshing perspective on the empathic dynamics of the reading and critical processes.

The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of Massachusetts Press

Brutal Choreographies investigates the novels of Margaret Atwood, focusing on their psychological and political concerns. Drawing on recent feminist and psychoanalytic theory, J. Brooks Bouson examines Atwood's recurring self, family, and romantic dramas, her novelistic subversion of romantic love ideology, and her critique of gender and power politics. Bouson also considers the oppositional strategies used in Atwood's novels: their punitive plotting and enactments of female revenge fantasies, their dialogic resistance to romantic discourse, and their self-conscious manipulation and sabotage of romance and other traditional plot lines and conventions.From the protofeminism of The Edible Woman, the cultural feminism of Surfacing, and the examination of the perils of Gothic thinking in Lady Oracle to the domestic and sexual warfare of Life Before Man, the anti-feminist backlash terrors of Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale, and the power politics of female relationships in Cat's Eye, Atwood's women-centered fiction has strong oppositional appeal. Because Atwood does not shun what she calls the "story of the disaster which is the world," her tales are often brutal, portraying female victimization at the hands of the husband or male lover, the mother, or the female friend. But if the Atwood novel has the power to disturb, compel, and at times brutalize its reader, it is also carefully choreographed, using form and design to contain and control the female fears, anxieties, and anger that drive the narrative.

Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood

Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women's Writings

Examines how twentieth-century women writers depict female bodily shame and trauma. How does physical, emotional, and sexual abuse shape women’s perceptions of their bodies and identities? How are women’s psyches affected by the sexual, racial, and cultural denigration that occurs when women’s bodies are represented as defective, spoiled, damaged, or dirtied? Embodied Shame skillfully explores these questions in the context of recent writings by North American women, contributing to work in shame theory and to feminist analyses of the intersections of theories of the body, affect, emotions, narrative, and trauma. By examining popular contemporary fictional and nonfictional texts, including Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, J. Brooks Bouson illuminates how deeply entrenched bodily shame continues to operate in contemporary culture, even as we celebrate the supposed freeing of the female body from the social and cultural constraints that have long bound it.

State Univ of New York Pr

Examines how twentieth-century women writers depict female bodily shame and trauma.

This book brings together the research findings of contemporary feminist age studies scholars, shame theorists, and feminist gerontologists in order to unfurl the affective dynamics of gendered ageism. In her analysis of what she calls “embodied shame,” J. Brooks Bouson describes older women’s shame about the visible signs of aging and the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging. Examining both fictional and nonfiction works by contemporary North American and British women authors, this book offers a sustained analysis of the various ways that ageism devalues and damages the identities of otherwise psychologically healthy women in our graying culture.  Shame theory, as Bouson shows, astutely explains why gendered ageism is so deeply entrenched in our culture and why even aging feminists may succumb to this distressing, but sometimes hidden, cultural affliction.

Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women's Writings (Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism)

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

<div>This book brings together the research findings of contemporary feminist age studies scholars, shame theorists, and feminist gerontologists in order to unfurl the affective dynamics of gendered ageism. In her analysis of what she calls "embodied shame," J. Brooks Bouson describes older women's shame about the visible signs of aging and the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging. Examining both fictional and nonfiction works by contemporary North American and British women authors, this book offers a sustained analysis of the various ways that ageism devalues and damages the identities of otherwise psychologically healthy women in our graying culture. &nbsp;Shame theory, as Bouson shows, astutely explains why gendered ageism is so deeply entrenched in our culture and why even aging feminists may succumb to this distressing, but sometimes hidden, cultural affliction.</div>

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Books by Bouson, J. Brooks

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bouson, J. Brooks. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Psychoanalysis and Culture)

Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Psychoanalysis and Culture)

The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self

Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood

Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women's Writings

Embodied Shame: Uncovering Female Shame in Contemporary Women's Writings

Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women's Writings (Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism)

Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women's Writings (Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism)