CIRCULATIONS OF AFFECTS: AFFECTIVE MEMORIES: THE SOLDIER IN SARAH KANE'S BLASTED (original) (raw)
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Scripting Memory and Emotions: Female Characters in Iraqi Theatre about War
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Combat Trauma and the Tragic Stage: "Restoration" by Cultural Catharsis
Intertexts, Vol 16, No.1, 2012
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Trauma on the Contemporary English Stage: Kane, Ravenhill, Ridley
Trauma on the Contemporary English Stage: Kane, Ravenhill, Ridley Özlem Karadağ ABSTRACT This study aims to explore personal and collective traumas in three representative in-yer-face plays: Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and F***ing and Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur. These three playwrights, who are among the most outstanding playwrights of the British theatre and in-yer-face movement, wrote their plays after the 1990s, which were still overshadowed by the horrific historical events of the twentieth century. Again, written shortly before and after the millennium, they usher in the ghosts of a traumatic past and fear of the future. First, the in-yer-face movement will be placed in the theatre tradition by examining its ties with the Theatre of Cruelty, the Theatre of the Absurd, and the Theatre of Catastrophe. Under the guidance of Trauma theory and taking into consideration the effects of the historical and cultural background of Britain after World War II, this study will then attempt to show that in the plays under discussion dystopian and traumatic elements become more and more central. Each character both because of his/her problematic personal background and collective catastrophes and radical changes is heavily traumatized. Story-telling, the telling of trauma, becomes central to the plays. It triggers trauma, but it also suggests a fragile chance of redemption for the characters and possibility for a better future. Recurrent trauma shatters their apathy or refusal to remember horrific events, memory of which must be recovered for the characters and culture to be healed. However, a sense of dystopia prevails.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES
Violence occurs as a daily human action all over the world; it may cause so many kinds of damage to individuals as well as to society: physical, psychological, or both. Many literary authors of different genres have tried their best to portray violence by showing its negative effects, especially playwrights because they have the chance to show people the dangers of violence through performance on stage to warn them against such negatively affected action. It has been a human action since the beginning of human life on this planet when the first crime happened on earth when Cane killed his brother Abel. In our modern world, people are witnessing daily violent actions as a result of destructive wars that turned the humans into brutal beings. This paper deals with violence as it occurred as a result of the atrocities of wars in two different societies during the same period of the 1990s: A European country (probably Bosnia or Britain), as reflected in Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), and I...
World Journal of English Language , 2022
The present study aims to critically review the aspects of war in selected Iraqi war novels-Sinan Antoon, The Baghdad Eucharist (2017), Corpse Washer (2013) Zauhair Jabouri, The Corpse Hunter (2014)-that focus on depicting vividly the traumatic experiences of Iraqi, particularly after the US-led invasion of Iraq 2003 and how these novels could recur constantly to humanist themes and traumatized figures, the psychological suffering of minorities and the oppressed. In other words, it aims to make visible specific historical instances of trauma in Iraqi war fiction. The present study undertakes an in-depth investigation of the socio-political and historical dimensions of Cathy Caruth's literary trauma simply because trauma experiences in Iraq were emanated from several causes such as social injustice, the oppression of minorities, political despotism, and the persecution of religious minorities, the displacement of Iraqis from the homeland, and the genocidal policies of jihadist. The study has found that Iraqi war fiction depends on the stylistic technique of repeating certain expressions, phrases, and lexical items to intensify the extraordinary events. It is a narrative of traumatic haunting known for its non-linear and circular style that often leads to ambiguity where readers are often unable to decode the authorial intentions, deriving its ambiguity from the traits of dreams and nightmares, the interpretations of which are continually and unredeemably haunted by the memory of loss.
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