THE HUNGER ARTISTS, STRAVING, WRITING AND IMPRISONMENT

Ellmann, Maud

ISBN 10: 067442705X / ISBN 13: 9780674427051

Published by Harvard University Press, 1993

About this Item

--Hardcover-- navy blue covers, thin hardcover book, just taller than 9". 136 pages with a few illustrations.FINE CONDITION- - dust jacket Fine Condition.

Seller Inventory # 054329

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE HUNGER ARTISTS, STRAVING, WRITING AND IMPRISONMENT
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067442705X
• ISBN 13: 9780674427051
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

The phenomenon of voluntary self-starvation - whether by political hunger strikers or lone anorectics - is a puzzle of engrossing power, suggesting a message more radical than any uttered aloud. In this fascinating phenomenology, Maud Ellmann teases out this message, its genesis, expression, and significance. How, she asks, has the act of eating become the metaphor for compliance, starvation the metaphor for protest? How does the rejection of food become the rejection of intolerable social constraints - or of actual imprisonment? What is achieved at the extremity of such a protest - at the moment of death?
Ellmann brilliantly unravels the answers; they lie, she shows, in the inverse relationship between bodily hunger and verbal expression. Drawing her examples from Yeats and Kafka, Marx and Freud, Wole Soyinka and the suffragettes, Mahatma Ghandi and Jane Fonda, she explores the entangled meanings of writing and hunger in our culture of starvers. Central to her discussion is an arresting comparison between the Irish Hunger Strike of 1981 and the plot of Richardson's Clarissa, in which the heroine starves herself to death in penance for - or, perhaps, revenge against - her rape. Both cases show a strange excess of words in contrast to the savage reduction of the flesh, as if the bodies of the starvers were devoured by their own verbosity. The Hunger Artists examines this vampirical feeding of words on flesh, revealing uncanny affinities between the labor of starvation and the birth of letters, diaries, poems, books. In her lean and vibrant prose, Ellmann reaches beyond the fashionable preoccupation with the body to the terrifying logic of disembodiment.