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Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century A Critical Reader

Sexuality and Trauma: Zhang Yixuan’s The Love that is Temporary and A Farewell Letter

Publication ,  Chapter
Jiang, L
March 12, 2023

In this chapter, I will conduct a comparative reading of Zhang Yixuan’s (張亦絢) The Love that is Temporary and A Farewell Letter and discuss the female protagonists’ traumatic memories caused by domestic violence and intimate partner violence. The two novels are written in the fashion of “traumatic realism,” a term proposed by Michael Rothberg (2000) in an attempt to “produce the traumatic event as an object of knowledge and to program and thus transform its readers so that they are forced to acknowledge their relationship to posttraumatic culture” (p. 103). As both protagonists are writers and the stories are narrated in the first-person perspective, they represent the traumatic realism “under the sign of trauma” through “self-reflexive metanarrative techniques” (Chen, 2020, p. 46). I argue that the self-reflections of the two female protagonists point to the issues of sex and sexuality, as a possible leeway in processing their traumatic memories.

Duke Scholars

ISBN

9789811983795

Publication Date

March 12, 2023

Start / End Page

125 / 125

Publisher

Springer
 

Citation

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Jiang, L. (2023). Sexuality and Trauma: Zhang Yixuan’s The Love that is Temporary and A Farewell Letter. In C.-R. Wu & M.-J. Fan (Eds.), Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century A Critical Reader (pp. 125–125). Springer.
Jiang, Linshan. “Sexuality and Trauma: Zhang Yixuan’s The Love that is Temporary and A Farewell Letter.” In Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century A Critical Reader, edited by Chia-rong Wu and Ming-ju Fan, 125–125. Springer, 2023.
Jiang L. Sexuality and Trauma: Zhang Yixuan’s The Love that is Temporary and A Farewell Letter. In: Wu C-R, Fan M-J, editors. Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century A Critical Reader. Springer; 2023. p. 125–125.
Jiang, Linshan. “Sexuality and Trauma: Zhang Yixuan’s The Love that is Temporary and A Farewell Letter.” Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century A Critical Reader, edited by Chia-rong Wu and Ming-ju Fan, Springer, 2023, pp. 125–125.
Jiang L. Sexuality and Trauma: Zhang Yixuan’s The Love that is Temporary and A Farewell Letter. In: Wu C-R, Fan M-J, editors. Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century A Critical Reader. Springer; 2023. p. 125–125.
Journal cover image

ISBN

9789811983795

Publication Date

March 12, 2023

Start / End Page

125 / 125

Publisher

Springer