you Can say that the autofiktiva the trend culminated, and died in connection with metoohösten 2017?
if we used to think that an autobiographical writer had a mission to make a vicarious trip down in the dark and smärtpunkterna, to come back and tell us mere mortals how it was, then, the assignment must have been when all of a sudden talked about just the pain points.
The personal testimony, the individual’s experiences, memories, and language – everything was in metoohösten to a tidal wave of text, a strong run that at the same time were thousands of solo performance.
book review: Judith Kiros reading Roxane Gay’s ”Bad feminist”
on jagberättandet as stylistic devices, but metoo made us definitely even more sensitive about who says something, who it is who’s talking and from what perspective.
And the stories have not stopped pouring in. The american writer Roxane Gay has now selected 30 texts about rape to an anthology that will in the English translation just a few months after the american edition.
Sigh, I hear you say – yet a metoobok?
So I thought I would also. Rape has a dramaturgical problem, which the author Aubrey Hirsch writes in one of the initial contributions:
”There is no dramaturgical structure in them, no dramatic climax. Nothing at stake really. Try to imagine how the listener leans forward: ’And then what happened?’ And you must answer: ’Nothing. That was all.’”
book review: Kajsa Ekis Ekman reading Roxane Gay ”In the wild”
rarely any moment of development, reconciliation or the ”Kill Bill”-ish revenge. However, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, nightmares, years of therapy, intimitetsproblem and self-destructive behaviour – to mention some of the difficulties the book’s writers are writing about.
Aubrey Hirsch’s analysis of rape as dramaturgical material is one of the strongest in the anthology. The main character is engelskalärare, and on a writing course a male student wrote a short story about a guy who dragged a drunk girl to the beach, taken off her all clothes, and had sex with her.
”the Tone is a little bit confusing,” says the teacher to the student. ”It seems almost romantic. Are we supposed to feel sympathy for this person even while he rapes her?”
”There is no rape,” protests the student. ”This is as well as based on when I met my girl for the first time.”
It is an incredible scene that describes the texts the uncanny ability to know more than its author.
Here are the sentences ’I took a course in indigenous ickebinära poetry’, in passing,
when reading the contributions is the lack of redemption. This is not the stories of perpetrators who are punished. Or even notified. The anthology is rather about the victims ‘ struggle for ”survival” – a word that is both used and criticized in the book – and about the different strategies to move ahead in life.
I get stuck for a text written by one of the two men, Anthony Frame. He was the victim of an abuse of a friend’s father one summer when he was eleven years old, and his story about how it affected his teens, and adults, marriage is both sad and intelligent, a cleverly written short story about being forced to live with a wounded sexuality: ”So I said yes, I feel good, even if my thoughts than in the day, leave the room for a while every time I dress by myself in front of her.”
I will be happy – if you can say so in this context – when I find Ally Sheedy among the writers, all the gothic teenagers an ancestor in the film ”the Breakfast club”. Sheedy writes about the appearance the pressure on the young actress, and her own refusal to contribute to the våldtäktskulturen in Hollywood by saying no to roles that make the entertainment of the sexual abuse.
Read more: Roxane Gay protest against Milo Yiannopoulos – the pull-back of the book
the level is high and there is a broad representation, even if it leans – as it usually does – to the academic middle class. Here are sentences like ”I took a course in indigenous ickebinära poetry” in passing.
What I take with me is Aubrey Hirsch list of sentences that she would like to teach their sons. One of them is this: ”I like you, but I think we are a bit full both two. Here you have my number. We can meet another time.”
