Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (original) (raw)
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Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture
2016
This lofty volume analyzes a circular cultural relationship: not only how trauma is reflected in cultural processes and products, but also how trauma itself acts as a critical shaper of literature, the visual and performing arts, architecture, and religion and mythmaking. The political power of trauma is seen through US, Israeli, and Japanese art forms as they reflect varied roles of perpetrator, victim, and witness. Traumatic complexities are traced from spirituality to movement, philosophy to trauma theory. And essays on authors such as Kafka, Plath, and Cormac McCarthy examine how narrative can blur the boundaries of personal and collective experience. Among the topics covered: Television: a traumatic culture. From Hiroshima to Fukushima: comics and animation as subversive agents of memory in Japan. The death of the witness in the era of testimony: Primo Levi and Georges Perec. Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and the possibility of writing a traumatic history of religion. Placing collective trauma within its social context: the case of the 9/11 attacks. Killing the killer: rampage and gun rights as a syndrome. This volume appeals to multiple readerships including researchers and clinicians, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and media researchers.
Trauma, Literature, and Culture
Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal, 2021
There has been a particular interest in trauma studies since the end of the twentieth century; not just in psychology and psychiatry, the main fields of study concerning mental disorders, but in every aspect of life. Consequently, a growing number of publications have been published that approach trauma from various fields: social and literary studies, comparative literature, philosophy, ethics, etc. At the same time, from talk shows to the news broadcasts, from popular media (post-apocalyptic movies, disaster films, games to art movies), from direct testimonies of survivors to fictive accounts of traumatic experience, there is a proliferation of all kinds of representations of trauma to the extent that testimony has been suggested as “the literary mode […] of our times”, whereas “our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony” (Felman 1995: 17). The question naturally arises whether trauma has become a cliché in contemporary literature and culture, or whether literature h...
When addressing historical experiences of Europeans during 'the long twentieth century' one is confronted with tremendous human losses, cruelty and suffering which cannot be adequately approached within a traditional 'impersonal' historical paradigm. Prominence of discourses of suffering and a pressing demand to canalise their destabilising power implies, among other things, that scholars need to move between the public and private, psychic and social, therapeutic and political, in order to provide adequate explanative models (Hodgkin and Radstone 2003: 103). In view of this, it may be advantageous to look closer at trauma theory which has risen to prominence in the last decades.
Surviving a catastrophe is an intense traumatic experience for a human being. Once the event is over, the individual then fights with his psychological demons as well as his socio-economic conditions which would have been severely altered in the catastrophe. A study of such a situation reveals a complex relationship between the social and personal spheres. Personal and public aspects of the trauma reveal several complexities and hence narratives that deal with it are often dense and complicated. Film as a form of narrative is extremely popular and often depicts social issues with a very sensitive perspective. As a trauma narrative, it captures the several possible perspectives without losing sight of the deep psychological issues at hand. The visuals help in this process. As a trauma narrative, Parzania seems to have captured every aspect worthy of being discussed in this context. Parzania is a film that deals with the Gujarat riots and its aftermath. My paper will make an attempt to look at this cinema from a Culture Studies perspective. I will focus on the sociological and psychological dimensions in this narrative using the tools of Culture Studies methodology.
Trauma and Cultural Memory Studies
Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, 2020
There are many ways of approaching the topic of trauma and cultural memory studies, not least because the “and” serves as an invitation to bring together two distinctive fields of scholarship, with their own histories, trajectories and methods, and consider how they inform the study of literature. Trauma theory, as it has come to be known, and cultural memory studies emerged – in their current form as interdisciplinary fields that are important for literary studies – in the final decades of the last century, as critics were seeking ways to bring the insights of poststructuralism into “real world” contexts. In this chapter, I survey some of the key developments in these fields over the past thirty years, and show how the concepts of trauma and cultural memory offer a productive lens for analysing contemporary literature and film. I consider some newer developments in the field, and challenges ahead.
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, 2020
The theory of cultural trauma emerged from the social sciences in the early twenty-first century, and in light of the increasing interest in what has by now become an established research paradigm, scholars working within the field have lately begun taking stock (e.g. Sciortino 2018; Eyerman 2019; Woods 2019). In these works of reflexive scholarship, authors highlight a number of tensions, tendencies and diverging trajectories among the the- ory’s many practitioners, but they stop short of calling out anything irreconcilable within this growing skein of analysis. The purpose of the present chapter is to do just that: to argue that there are, in fact, two distinct and not entirely compatible concepts being used under the shared term “cultural trauma”. This has until now been unacknowledged, a fact that has led to considerable theoretical muddiness. In order to clear the water, we would do well to recognize that today it is more accurate to talk about the theories of cultural trauma and to encourage scholars in the field to be cognizant of which theory they are applying to their research.