Volume 21 (2019) Issue 1 Article 5 T Tr ra aum uma a, E , Ethic thics, a s, and the B nd the Bo od dy a y at W t Wa ar in B r in Br ritt ittain ain, B , Bor orde den a n and B nd Ba ag gnold nold C Ca ar rolin olina S a Sá ánche nchez z-P -Pale alenc nci ia C a Ca ar ra azo zo University of Seville Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality

more »

... dies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies.Abstract: In her article "Trauma, Ethics, and the Body at War in Brittain, Borden and Bagnold," Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo discusses how the autobiographical accounts of the conflict by Vera Brittain, Enid Bagnold and Mary Borden, inspired by their experiences as voluntary nurses in the front, deconstruct the meanings of femininity, masculinity and patriotism, contesting the official rhetoric of passivity that defined the role of women in World War I. Their extreme engagement with the precariousness and vulnerability of others elicits an empathic response that can be interpreted through Judith Butler (2004; 2009 ), Emmanuel Lévinas (1969 and Alan Badiou's (1993) ethics of alterity. Against the abstract assumptions of honor and heroism in many male war accounts, these women's face-to-face encounter with the suffering bodies impels them to an intersubjective relation defined by sensibility and affectivity. Their exposure to the limits of (in)humanity implies a drive towards commonality that cannot be overlooked and suggests a gendered intervention in the body politic in which the war/peace, front/home binaries are necessarily redefined. Their texts are also "bodies in transit" inasmuch as they move between Victorian conventional order and a sense of Modernist fragmentariness evoking the distorted anatomies of the combatants they nursed and signalling a clear interaction between war, gender and experimental writing. Re-visiting Brittain, Bagnold and Borden from the critical perspectives of the Ethical Turn and Trauma Studies is essential for a reconceptualization of war and of the intricacies of its representation. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21.