John Zilcosky – författare

Interest in travel writing has grown rapidly within the disciplines of postcolonial and cultural studies; however, recent scholarship has failed to place travel writing within the larger literary tradition. Writing Travel assembles a superb collection of essays that demonstrate how travel attempts to reconfigure the world and, in so doing, to become a metaphor for imagination, subjectivity, and representation itself.Examining a broad range of texts and travellers from across the world, the contributors discuss canonical authors such as Homer, Goethe, and Baudelaire, alongside lesser known writers such as Theodor Herzl, Hans Erich Nossack, and William Gibson. This theoretically rich volume draws connections between travel and narrative, and provides powerful insights into the relationship between travel and the spoken act of storytelling, as well as the more ambivalent act of story writing.An engaging collection of essays by first-rate scholars, Writing Travel is an illuminating exploration of the history of travel writing, its influence on other literary genres, and the origins of narrative.

Around 1900, when the last blank spaces on their maps were filled, Europeans traveled to far-flung places hoping to find traces of the spectacularly foreign. They discovered instead what Freud called, several years later, the ""uncannily"" familiar: disturbing reflections of themselves—either actual Europeans or Westernized natives. This experience was most extreme for German travelers, who arrived in the contact zones late, on the heels of other European colonialists, and it resulted not in understanding or tolerance but in an increased propensity for violence and destruction. The quest for a “virginal,” exotic existence proved to be ruined at its source, mirroring back to the travelers demonic parodies of their own worst aspects. In this strikingly original book, John Zilcosky demonstrates how these popular “uncanny” encounters influenced Freud’s—and the literary modernists’—use of the term, and how these encounters remain at the heart of our crosscultural anxieties today.

Whether it is our love of chance and vicarious thrill, our need to release anxiety and aggression, or our appreciation of the arc traced by a ball at a crucial moment – sports draw us in.The Allure of Sports in Western Culture contributes to contemporary debates about the attraction of sports in the West by providing a historical grounding as well as theoretical perspectives and contextualization. Bringing together the work of literary theorists, historians, and athletes, the volume’s dual emphasis allows us to better understand the historical and ideological reasons for the changing nature of sports’ allure from Ancient Greece and Rome to the modern Olympics. The findings show that allure is shaped by larger forces such as poverty, wealth, and status; changing moral standards; and political and cultural indoctrination. On the other hand, personal and psychological factors play an equally important, if less tangible role: our love for scandal, the seduction of deception and violence, and the physiological intoxication of watching and participating in sports keep us hooked. At the heart of the volume lies the tension between our love of sport and our knowledge of its only barely hidden cruelty, exploitation, and manipulation.

From the Napoleonic Wars to the invention of the railway to the shell shock of World War I, writers tried to give voice to the suffering that war and industrial technology had wrought all around them. Yet they, like the doctors who treated these victims, repeatedly ran up against the incapacity of language to describe such anguish; those who suffered trauma, those who tried to heal it, and those who represented it were all unable to find the appropriate words. In The Language of Trauma, John Zilcosky uncovers the reactions of three major central European writers – E.T.A. Hoffmann, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka – to the birth of modern trauma in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Zilcosky makes the case that Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka managed to find the language of trauma precisely by not attempting to name the trauma conclusively and instead allowing their writing to mimic the experience itself. Just as the victims’ symptoms seemed not to correspond to a physical cause, the writers’ words did not connect directly to the objects of the world. While doctors attempted to overcome this indeterminacy, these writers embraced and investigated it; they sought a language that described language’s tragic limits and that, in so doing, exemplified the wider literary and philosophical crisis of their time. Zilcosky boldly argues that this linguistic scepticism emerged together with the medical inability to name the experience of trauma. He thereby places trauma where it belongs: at the heart of both medicine’s diagnostic predicament and modern literature’s most daring experiments.