Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film

Embodied VulnerAbilities in Contemporary Literature and Film explores how the newly gained ontological depth of vulnerability enables empathic responses towards others and fosters resilience and agency of the very vulnerable bodies. Under this new critical frame, the literary and filmic visualization of vulnerability can help raise social awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities as well as those of others to bring about global solidarity based on proximity as well as on affinity and affect. The scope of analysis of this volume is as wide as diverse, including canonical and non-canonical works in narrative, drama, poetry, and film across the world produced in English, Spanish, Japanese and French languages. But as this volume’s proposal considers the representation of vulnerability across multimodal, multilingual products created in different cultures, it also triangles the application of vulnerability with conceptualizations of the material aspects of the body in its representational potentialities of embodiment and affect, tackled from well-known and widely established approaches such as ecocriticism, trauma studies or affect theory, among others. A key innovation in this work lies in taking hold of multifarious theories that are only apparently disengaged from each other in order to study the representation of different intersecting forms of vulnerability in sundry cultural, literary and filmic creations, emerging from disparate linguistic and geographical corners of the globe. The volume is prefaced by expert in disability studies David T. Mitchell and includes an introduction theorizing the notion of "ecology of vulnerability" as a new critical construct for countering the current global economy and its devaluation of human beings and ecosystems by reducing them to metonymies pressing on vulnerability.