Bringing poststructuralist theories of discourse into dialogue with biologically and culturally informed models of pain and affect, this book explores the representation of traumatic historical events such as war and revolution in literary texts by Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Zola.  Focusing on the rising industrial capitalism of early modern France, Vaheed Ramanzani considers how the patterns of thought and practice developed during that period inflect a contemporary “culture of denial” and critiques the symbiosis between everyday forms of language and mass irruptions of violence.

Praise

"The cogency and scope of this challenging but compelling argument about pain and the rhetoric of pain is as breathtaking as its exposition is patient and precise"--Ross Chambers, University of Michigan (Emeritus)

 

“Ramazani’s study measures the cultural resonances of the transformations of 19th century France by looking at an elemental register of human experience, pain.  His thesis is arresting: that the cultural processing of pain mirrored and deepened the forms of material stratification and segregation increasingly imposed upon people and increasingly brought to consciousness by the developments that Louis-Napoleon’s regime was organizing for France. Ramazani’s analysis is theoretically sophisticated; his scholarship is extensive and pertinent.  His close readings are ingenious and revealing.  This is an important book on a fundamental topic.”-- Richard Terdiman, Professor of Literature and the History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz

About the Author(s)

Vaheed Ramazani

Vaheed Ramazani is Associate Professor of French, Tulane University.