Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives, eds. Dana Mihailescu, Roxana Oltean, Mihaela Precup (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014) (original) (raw)
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During the past decade there has been a rapid growth in literature on traumatic experience, but what remains missing from the expanding field of commentary is any sustained consideration of how those who are outsiders to the experience deal with the challenge of its presence in their world. Related to this are some fundamental questions about how traumatic events are acknowledged in the public domain and come to form part of the fabric of public memory. The contributing writers to this collection are primarily from humanities and cultural history, though there are also essays from specialists in psychology and the social sciences, and interviews with professionals who have a primary involvement with traumatic events. Contributions focus on key traumatic media events of the last decade as well as those during the twentieth century in countries such as the USA, Europe, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Indonesia, Cuba and Australia.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia, 2021
A focus on trauma’s institutional trajectory in literary and cultural theory serves to narrow the transnational and multidirectional scope of memory studies. While Sigmund Freud’s attempt in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to define trauma in order to account for World War I veterans’ symptoms might serve as a provisional departure point, the psychological afflictions that haunted American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War reinforced the explanatory value of what came to be called “posttraumatic stress disorder,” which the American Psychiatric Association added to the DSM-III (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1980. Multiple dramatic films released in the 1980s about Vietnam conveyed images of the American soldier’s two-fold traumatization by the violence he not only witnessed but also perpetrated along with the ambivalent treatment he received upon his return to a protest-riven nation waking up to the demoralizing realization that US military prowess...
Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature
2017
Interest in trauma has increased substantially since PTSD was included in the American Psychological Association's diagnostic manual in 1980, partly as a result of years of work from US veterans' associations (Whitehead 2004: 4). Trauma theory, especially literary trauma theory, can be traced to the Yale school and the landmark volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) edited by Cathy Caruth, though later scholars have been sceptical about Caruth's particular reading of psychoanalysis (Leys 2000) and the Eurocentric focus of much early trauma theory. In terms of literary theory, the editors of the present volume note parallels between postmodern scepticism as regards grand narratives and the stylistic and rhetorical experimentation frequently found in both postmodern and trauma literature. It borrows theoretical frameworks from the likes of Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and Caruth, in addition to cultural studies and theories of affect-according to the back cover description. With some justification, much is also made of the interdisciplinarity of the collection. Caruth and the "school of Deconstructive Trauma Studies" (2), however, do come in for some criticism in the introduction, with suggestions that Caruth's focus on the "unrepresentable" and "unspeakable" (3) seems to lack a basis for political action and risks placing a block against the potential of narrative for healing trauma, as suggested by some psychotherapists (2-3). The introduction also echoes Dominick LaCapra's warning against conflating "generalised
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.
Trauma, Memory and Identity Crisis: Reimagining and Rewriting the Past
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing , 2022
By dealing with various traumatic events, this volume shows the impact of trauma on the victims’ memory and identity on both individual and collective levels. Bringing together scholars from varying social, cultural, ethnic and political backgrounds, it foregrounds the suffering of the marginalised, thus giving them a narrative, a voice. The book shows the way in which the victims of trauma confront the past, instead of running away from it, share their stories with others, and thus (re)assert their shattered identity. It also highlights the way in which (trauma) narratives can enable the traumatised to challenge official history and to come up with an alternative version of it. Put another way, trauma narratives provide the victims and survivors the opportunity to reimagine, to reinvent and to rewrite the past in order to secure a peaceful future, and help them find a place in history.
Memory and Trauma. Philosophical Perspectives
Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso , 2024
Michelle Maiese: Trauma, dissociation, and relational authenticity Caroline Christoff: Performative trauma narratives: Imperfect memories and epistemic harms Aisha Qadoos: Ambiguous loss: A loved one's trauma Alberto Guerrero Velazquez: El trauma está en la respuesta. Hacia una visión post-causal en la definición de trauma psicológico Clarita Bonamino, Sophie Boudrias, and Melanie Rosen: Dreams, trauma, and prediction errors Gabriel Corda: Memoria episódica y trastorno de estrés postraumático en animales no humanos: una propuesta metodológica María López Ríos, Christopher Jude McCarroll, and Paloma Muñoz Gómez: Memory, mourning, and the Chilean constitution Sergio Daniel Rojas-Sierra, and Tito Hernando Pérez Pérez: Subjetividades rememorantes, marcas narrativas y trauma cultural en la construcción de memoria de desmovilizados de las FARC-EP en el AETCR Pondores Germán Bonanni: Y después de la guerra... ¿Qué?
POST-MEMORY: FAMILY AS A SPACE OF HISTORICAL TRAUMA TRANSMISSION
Family stories give the individual a sense of identity and create a story for the inclusion, transmission and attachment of new generations. If we know the past of the family, we can tell the story of how it is. The family features of the past and today are familiar to the individual. New generations depend on the way of movement and discourses of previous generations. While some of these stories are about identity, ethnicity, culture, some are about family history, positive or negative experiences. Traumatic events that family members have witnessed or experienced are transferred to later generations. Traumatically overwhelming, unbearable, unimaginable memories and discourses go beyond social discourse and are passed to the future generations as emotional tenderness or a chaotic urgency. Various theories and methods have been developed to understand and clarify this transmission. Transgenerational transmission studies have come into question with Holocaust studies, first studies on that topic began with the 2nd and 3rd generations of Holocaust survivors. Theories of trauma transmission point some different approaches of how traumatic events experienced by the family transmitted, they are: transgenerational transmission, inter-generational transmission, multigenerational transmission, cross-generational transmission and parental transmission. In 1990, Marianne Hirsch proposed the concept of post-memory as a transgenerational transmission in a work on formation of collective memory of Holocaust. The concept became a fundamental element of memory work, causing a series of debates. According to the theorists who embraced the post-memory conception, there was a need for a specific conceptualization to study the function of traumatic experience transmission through images and stories, to establish the knowledge of experience of later generations. It thus, made possible, to describe a proximal experience or indirect recall from a transgenerational point of view, in which the subjective relationship with the event is preserved. In the last two decades, post-memory was centered on almost all trauma transmission and cultural studies. Not only the next generation of Holocaust survivors, but also dynamics of other societies who were exposed to societal and historical trauma are covered within this concept. This study handles the transgenerational trauma transmission in post-memory theoretical framework. How transmission occurs, what is transmitted to generations, when transmission took place and how this transmission affects future generations are topics of that study.