No pain, no gain. A study in narratives of suffering. Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster & Lauren Slater's Lying

Abstract

"The experience of suffering both provokes and resists narration. It is at the hearl of many of the world's great stories (the Odyssey, the Book of Job, the Gospels, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost) and yet absent, in a fundamental way, from every story. Because intense suffering takes language away, retrospective narration can seem futile, even falsifying. Moreover, it often raises more questions than it answers. (Who or what is responsible for suffering? Is it merited? What ends it? How can it be made commensurable with the rest of ones's life? What is its meaning? How does one cope with it?) In spite of all this, sufferers continue to tug at the shirls/eeves of passersby, and passersby continue to stop, listen and fall into the sufferers's story. Why?" My opening paragraph is a description of a course that I discovered in the Bard College Course Catalogue for the fall semester 2001 - the year of the falling towers. I was immediately intrigued by the description, having myself experienced great loss, and suffering from it again despite a long passage of time and coping. The course was called Narratives of Suffering, drew on literature from the American literary canon, and proved to be very enriching and inspiring. Starting chronologically with short stories of captivity and shipwreck narratives, we later...

Jak Kaye Gibbons, tak Lauren Slater jsou pro ceskeho ctenare zcela neznamymi spisovatelkami. Jednfm z diu teto diplomove prace je proto priblizit tyto mlade americke autorky ceskemu prostredL Kaye Gibbons pochazf ze Severnf Karoliny a vzhledem k tematum, jimz se ve sve pr6ze venuje, a stylu, jfmz pfse, se radf do proudu jizanske literatury po boku Williama Faulknera, Flannery O'Connor a dalsfch. Jiz jejf debut, kterYm se v teto praci zabyvame, nazvany die hlavnf hrdinky El/en Foster (1987), sklidil necekany uspech a mnoho prestiznfch ocenenL Od te doby napsala autorka dalsfch sest uspesnych romanu a svuj vlastnf zivotopis. Charakteristicke jsou jejf hrdinky - vzdy silne sobestacne zeny z jizanskeho venkova. Lauren Slater pochazf z Masachusettes. Ackoli je predevsfm psycholozkou, pfse eseje a napsala jiz sest knih, z toho ctyri autobiografie. Zde se budeme venovat jejf tret! autobiografii Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (2000), ktera pojednava 0 autorcine detstvf a dospfvanL Ve svych dalsfch autobiografifch zachytila autorka sve tehotenstvf, zivot s Prozacem (antidepresivum) ci svou terapeutickou praxi. Krome psanf se Slater venuje rfzenf kliniky dusevnfho zdravf a vyucovani kreativniho psani. Diplomova prace No Pain, No Gain je studii pojednavajfd 0 zpusobech, kterYmi Ize diskursivne uchopit lidske utrpeni,...