Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works

This collection comprises essays from various interdisciplinary perspectives – e.g. literary scholarship, intermediality, art history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and medicine – to analyze and interpret the fictional and non-fictional works by Siri Hustvedt, an author whose reputation and public presence have been growing steadily in the 21st century and who is recognized as one of the most widely read and appreciated contemporary American writers. In her significance and stature as a public intellectual, she is not merely an American writer but a transnational, cosmopolitan author, who develops new forms not only of literary narrative but of interdisciplinary thought and writing, bringing together otherwise separated genres and branches of knowledge in a broad spectrum between literature and philosophy, historiography and art, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, narrative and medicine. The present volume is structured into the parts “Literary Creation and Communication,” Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” “Medicine and Narrative,” “Vision, Perception, and Power,” and “Trauma, Memory, and the Ambiguities of Self” and closes with an interview of Siri Hustvedt by Susanne Becker in which Hustvedt elucidates her personal conception of her own creative processes of writing.

• First comprehensive collection on Siri Hustvedt
• Variety of theoretical and conceptual approaches
• Brings together European and US-American scholarship on Siri Hustvedt / contemporary American literature
  

Johanna Hartmann, University of Augsburg, Germany; Christine Marks, CUNY, New York, USA; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany.

"It is an excellent introduction to her writing for students and scholars of contemporary writing, which will hopefully find its way onto more academic programmes in the US, UK and Europe. As this volume proves, it certainly deserves to be. At long last, we have an academic study worthy of the association with her work."
Alexander Williamson in: Anglia 2017; 135(1): 234–238

"Overall, this is a fascinating and vastly enlightening collection of interdisciplinary essays on an internationally renowned author whose popularity and reputation is increasing steadily."
Diana Wagner in: Amerikastudien / American Studies 63.1 (2018)