Writing in Pain — Literature, History, and the Culture of Denial

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.

Vaheed Ramazani is Associate Professor of French, Tulane University.