Sex, Drugs, and Gentrification in American Literature
Housing Trauma and the City
Sex, Drugs, and Gentrification in American Literature
Housing Trauma and the City
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Description
Through a close reading of the figures of America's disenfranchised and most vulnerable-the homeless, sex workers, drug addicts, and veterans-Aimee Pozorski argues that the contemporary American literary tradition has long testified to the traumatic effects of gentrification in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The classic slogan from the 1960s, “sex, drugs, & rock n roll” was itself a specifically chosen critique of society. Retroactively, however, our literature tells us that sex work, sexually transmitted disease, and drug addiction are not the “sex” and “drugs” we come to associate with freedom of Woodstock. Rather, they are signs of human lives overlooked and unaccounted for, and now connotate danger and death more than freedom itself. Pozorski argues that where political and journalistic discourse falls short in showing the distinctions, the literary language of American texts function to defamiliarize the problem and shock readers into action.
Taking a new approach to trauma studies and cultural criticism, Sex, Drugs, and Gentrification seeks to give a face to the faceless in our everyday lives and demands that we reassess our treatment of-and attitudes toward-suffering in the American city.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Understanding “Housing Trauma”
1. “Just Look”: Bearing Witness in Harlem to Dispossession and Drug Addiction
2. Before and After 1967: Newark's “Unclaimed Experience” in the Work of Philip Roth
3. Addressing the Pittsburgh Renewal Council: Gentrification in August Wilson's Two Trains Running and Jitney
4. Sex, Drugs, & Gentrification: Where the AIDS Crisis and American Housing Crisis Meet
5. “Our Dirtbag Narnia”: Art, Literature, and the Sacred Spaces of Kensington
6. War in the Middle Western States: Traumatic Dislocation and Financial Precarity in Urban Wisconsin
7. “the city is better off without you”: Forgotten Brothers Bearing Witness in Memoirs about Katrina
8. Soul Wound: There There and the Future of Trauma Theory
Works Cited
Acknowledgements
Product details
| Published | 21 Jan 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 208 |
| ISBN | 9798216256304 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Series | Reading Trauma and Memory |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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