Painful Writing: Scenes of Suffering in American Literature

My dissertation focuses on some of the ways in which twentieth-century American writers have represented pain and suffering. I examine the narrative strategies used by Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and Claudia Rankine (among others) to depict the event of bodily distress as a biocultural phenomenon. I argue that these texts describe pain as a conscious experience that is entwined with language, memory, noxious stimuli, social codes of behaviour, racial identity, gender expression, and class. I anchor my analysis in scenes of suffering that situate the aches and torments of their characters within the broader narrative framework of American settler-colonial violence. My work examines two storytelling strategies commonly used in American texts: first, I analyze the trope of a naïve youth who stumbles upon spectacles of intense injury and suffering. Texts like Huck Finn and “Chickamauga” deploy this narrative design to showcase how jingoist war-mongering, militarized expansionism, gun violence, and racially-charged assaults all create a national climate of profound misery. This anguish manifests as physical injury but also, most crucially, in sensations of psychological distress caused by stress, confusion, and fear. In The Red Badge of Courage and Black Boy: American Hunger, witnessing pain blurs into participating in it, as the protagonists find themselves experiencing profound suffering as a response to their physical trauma and distressed outrage towards America’s cruel cultures. The second trope I examine is that of the weary writer who is tasked with the burden of documenting, diagnosing, and conveying the pain around them. Writers like Nathaniel West, James Agee, Philip Roth, and Claudia Rankine all craft scenes in which a storyteller reflects on the act of narrativizing pain in order to illuminate some of the ways in which pain is socially constructed. My dissertation analyzes the linguistic strategies used to bring pain to life on the page and convey how pain is inflicted and felt. As my chapters unfold, I will reveal how American texts render the phenomena of suffering as a linguistically-structured conscious response to violence, racism, class conflict, and a host of other social issues plaguing the nation.

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