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With Great House (2010), Nicole Krauss offers a choral novel that interweaves the lives of several characters loosely connected by a huge, wooden desk that one of them relentlessly chases around the world. A possible symbol of the memory of the Second World War Jewish genocide transmitted to younger generations, the desk powerfully materializes transmission in its potentially traumatic, obsessional, and violent dimensions. This essay deals with the way first- and second-generation women, in the novel, develop ingenious, creative but also uncompromising responses to the inescapable duty of remembrance. While the dominating male characters freeze memory in timeless, petrified representations, these female writers expose its terrible necessity while hiding nothing of the damages memory causes to witnesses and descendants. They claim a right of inventory and use the desk as an echo-chamber reflecting both the suffering voices of children and the dark presence of defaulting fathers and failing mothers, thus allowing for a new generation to be born with a more bearable heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interdisciplinary study examines Ian McEwan's Atonement by combining narrative analysis with the theories of Sigmund Freud and Paul Virilio. It looks closely at narrative techniques, time-related complexities, and cultural meanings in Atonement, linking Freud's idea of repetition compulsion with Virilio's views on technology and perception. Briony Tallis represents both Freudian traumatic re-enactment and Virilio's concept of the integral accident. Her ongoing guilt, like a rosary, symbolizes the repetitive nature of trauma. Using Virilio's gestalt theory, the study offers a new way to understand the novel's focus on perception. This research fills a gap in existing literature by bringing together Freud's psychoanalytic perspective and Virilio's technological insights to analyze Atonement. This combination of theories is a new approach that provides fresh insights into how McEwan's narrative structure reflects the interplay between trauma, technology, and cultural reception. For example, the study explores how the novel's fragmented narrative mirrors Briony's fractured psyche and how technological advancements during the wartime setting influence characters' perceptions and actions. This study of Ian McEwan's Atonement demonstrates how stories can help individuals understand their feelings and experiences better. It uses psychology and technology to explore how storytelling affects the understanding of trauma, perception, and the modern world.

With Great House (2010), Nicole Krauss offers a choral novel that interweaves the lives of several characters loosely connected by a huge, wooden desk that one of them relentlessly chases around the world. A possible symbol of the memory of the Second World War Jewish genocide transmitted to younger generations, the desk powerfully materializes transmission in its potentially traumatic, obsessional, and violent dimensions. This essay deals with the way first- and second-generation women, in the novel, develop ingenious, creative but also uncompromising responses to the inescapable duty of remembrance. While the dominating male characters freeze memory in timeless, petrified representations, these female writers expose its terrible necessity while hiding nothing of the damages memory causes to witnesses and descendants. They claim a right of inventory and use the desk as an echo-chamber reflecting both the suffering voices of children and the dark presence of defaulting fathers and failing mothers, thus allowing for a new generation to be born with a more bearable heritage.

Copyright of Critical Literary Studies is the property of University of Kurdistan and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The pandemic provides an opportunity for filmmakers to identify the potential of the limited space. The pandemic-driven perspectives of the filmmakers widen the horizon of space beyond the spatial and temporal dimensions. Malayalam films have responded to the unprecedented and shocking outbreak of COVID-19 faster because space and its utilization have been always minimal in the industry. People have been shattered in isolation and the new normal imparted new phrases and idioms to the language of life. The desire to socialize, the angst to stay and work at home, the issues of parenting, and the financial crisis have all become part of the new normal. To narrate any kind of story has appeared challenging because the pandemic is an amalgamation of anxieties and it demands to be faithful to all the unfortunate situations of life while featuring it. Thus, the idea of shifting from the physical space to the psychological space progressed and it paves way for extraordinary films with brilliant performances. This paper is an attempt to explore the documentation of the pandemic in Aarkkariyam, a 2021 mystery drama and Joji, a crime thriller. The paper focuses on the many facets of the pandemic like psychological trauma, isolation, work from home, social and financial instability, and the change in the dynamics of ‘home’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I identify where contemporary scholarship on Jonah continues to ask enduring questions of any biblical text like dating, structure, and message. I also outline how scholars have brought contemporary approaches to the book. Finally, I suggest some points of divergence between scholarship in the late 20thand early 21stcenturies and consider how recent scholarship has treated past contributions. This survey shows that scholarship continues to grapple with questions that have long pervaded Jonah’s interpretive history. At the same time, contemporary approaches bring exciting possibilities to a book that has often resisted a monologic interpretation.

Sylvia Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar (1963), gives us an insight into the life of a young woman, Esther Greenwood, and the process of her adapting to life in 1950s America. As it is a rather traumatic process due to her (in)ability to accept and conform to the rules of a male-dominated society, the aim of this paper is to analyse this novel within the framework of trauma studies. The novel follows Esther Greenwood’s descent into depression and her attempts to make choices about her future, while showing that she finds the task rather traumatic because her desires are mutually exclusive and not in accordance with what the consumerist American society deems acceptable. Bessel A. van der Kolk et al. state that what makes something traumatic is “the subjective assessment by victims of how threatened and helpless they feel” (2007). Before the analysis of the novel, the theoretical framework is provided in terms of defining trauma, relying on the research conducted by Sigmund Freud, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992), and other similar studies connected to the analysis of trauma and, in particular, trauma in Sylvia Plath’s oeuvre. The historical background of the novel is also examined, in order to provide a clearer picture of the period the novel is set in. Hopefully, this small scale research offers another way of perceiving the traumatic experience of being a woman in a domineering, patriarchal society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and what does the literature on Buchenwald remember? How does the paradox between the impossibility of archiving and the will to rescue the victims of concentration camps, and more specifically of Buchenwald, from anonymity, take shape in literature? The aim of this contribution is to answer these questions by analysing Ivan Ivanji’s novel Der Aschenmensch von Buchenwald [The Man of Ashes of Buchenwald] as an impossible archive containing the voices of the dead of the concentration camp. To this end, the parallels between Ivanji’s novel and the anti-archive created by Danilo Kiš in his text The Encyclopedia of the Dead (A Whole Life) will be explored. Both texts aspire to reflect the (impossible) totality, while paying homage to the anonymous dead of the wars and dictatorships of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While serial killings, murders, and other violent deaths are traumatic incidents for the communities in which they occur, they also attract a great deal of media attention and form the basis for numerous cinematic adaptations in US-American cinema and beyond. Many of these movies employ a sensationalist approach and focus on the social environments of the killings: the perpetrator's upbringing, triggering experiences, or a generally troubled personality. There are only a limited number of cinematic treatments of violent killings that focus on the natural environment or the landscapes where these incidents occurred. This article is concerned with filmmakers using (cinematic) landscapes as a mode of cultural expression for violence and trauma. It seeks to show that James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986) calls for a different understanding of landscape that goes beyond a mere setting for narrative, as it gives landscape active agency in its mediation of two seemingly unconnected murder cases. The film compares and juxtaposes the murder of Kirsten Costas by Bernadette Protti in a suburb of San Francisco in 1984 with the killings of Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in the 1950s. In doing so, the film presents viewers with two distinct functions of landscape in mediating violence and trauma: as a spatialization of time and as socio-political surroundings. Analyzing these aspects of the film helps us to better understand the link between landscape, violence, and trauma in cinematic treatments of violent incidents and also sheds light on the broader connection between landscape and trauma culture.

Literary echoes of tragic events, deeply rooted in the collective memory of some nations or ethnic groups, very often represent the basis of their overall concept of identity. This trauma of the difficult construction of a sense of belonging (especially the experience of exile, diaspora, expulsion, loss of homeland, ethnocide, genocide, etc.) is reflected not only in the works of the generation concerned but also of later generations, deeply influenced by transmitted perceptions of trauma. Coping with the question of belonging to several worlds, cultures and languages -- and sometimes to none of them completely -- results in a specific form of literary processing and also requires a specific approach to literary analysis and to the translation of trauma poetry. The Armenian topos of pandukht or gharib (exile) should be understood within a broader context of the traumatic past and its subsequent interpretations. Key cultural words as stigmas of traumatic past, leaving intangible traces through narratives, represent an essential vector of collective memory here. The landscape description is emotionally invested and it could be perceived as a rhetorical expression of extremely disruptive experience. Focusing on Armenian women poets, whose works influenced the literary landscape of Armenia and Armenian diaspora in the second half of 20th and the beginning of 21st century and concentrating on their prevailing topoi, the role of memory in the shaping of trauma and its representation in poetry will be more obvious. In the case of female poets from the diaspora, their poetry should be read within the frame of their exilic experience as a kind of postmodern itinérance. The textual analysis of their poems perceived through trauma lens could bring a significant contribution to trauma studies theory in general as well as to gender studies within the Armenian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is devoted to the analysis of the collective trauma of Belarusian society received during the violent suppression of protests that broke out in 2020 after the falsification of the presidential elections and lasted for several months. The empirical basis for the article comprised two sociological studies conducted in 2022 and 2023 under the leadership of the author of this paper. The methodological basis of the study is grounded in the theoretical developments of trauma studies research programs. Howe ver, the specificity of the Belarusian situation, which consists in ongoing retraumatization, necessitated the development of the author's version of the research methodology. It is based on a distinction between "trauma tic experience", "trauma" and "post-traumatic growth." Based on this, the scale of traumatic experience, the degree of traumatization of society and the coping strategies used by society are separately examined. All parts of Belarusian society need to be studied from the point of view of collective traumatization, but this article considered only the protes ting part of Belarusian society as the most traumatized during the protests. The article shows that the entire protest-minded part of Belarusian society has a traumatic experience. In addition to the ongoing repression, the traumatic situation is aggravated by media retraumatization. At the same time, there is no need to talk about a high degree of traumatization. Although Belarusian society is characterized by an increased level of anxiety, there are no negative assessments of past protest experien ces. On the contrary, participants in the 2020 protests tend to idealize this experience. In addition, both the adoption of intact coping strategies and the functioning of a predominantly positive protest narrative help overcome traumatic experiences. At the same time, the "protest narrative" has not yet been formalized to the extent that collective trauma would begin to function as cultural trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the intersection of trauma studies and new materialism, offering a fresh perspective on human trauma through the prism of nonhuman forces. Drawing inspiration from material ecocriticism, a paradigm that evolved from materialist and posthumanist ideas and has not yet been brought into contact with trauma studies, the article underscores the significance of considering the embodiment of experience, thus arriving at an extended notion of trauma. This new theoretical framework is tested by examining the testimonial poetry of Latvian writer Aleksandrs Pelēcis, who was deported to Siberia by Soviet authorities in 1946. His poems employ inanimate objects and animals to create metonymical and metaphorical connections between human and nonhuman actors within the context of long exile. By illuminating a shared experiential space, Pelēcis manages to project and diffract traumatic feelings and memories, thus making them more comprehensible to his readers. This, in turn, places trauma studies on a trajectory away from the traditional conceptualisation of the inexpressible and the awkward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Lily Brett's The Auschwitz Poems (2004) and Elizabeth Rosner's Gravity (2014), two female-authored second-generation poetic renditions of the Holocaust. Examining these works through the lens of postmemory, my goal is to shed new light on the intergenerational transmission of trauma from a gendered perspective, focusing on its connections with poetry. I argue that both anthologies share at the core of their narrative a gender-focused layer of meaning, which penetrates into a postmemorial experience that is to a great extent defined by this social construct. This essay fosters scholarship on postmemory by conceiving it as a double-edged process encompassing both aesthetics and a form of social activism, and informed by feminism, which is mirrored in the reconception and rethinking of both the female body and gender hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the category of trauma as a specific object of interdisciplinary research, and identifies the signs of historical trauma. Historical trauma is understood as the preserved memory of generations about social upheavals and events that disrupted the usual course of life and transformed the system of basic values. The scientific objectives of the research involved analysis of the events that took place on the territory of the closed administrative and territorial formations of the nuclear industry in the 1990s and can be characterized as a historical trauma. The breakdown of the usual way of life in the determined, artificially created environment of closed cities which was more painful than in a significant part of open cities became the consequence of the all-Russian transient transformational dynamics. The characteristics of the period on the part of the population of atomic cities were often accompanied by themes of physical and domestic survival and social tension. The events that have taken the meanings of trauma place can be described as representing historical significance and having in the collective consciousness. On this basis, the author has concluded that the study of the post-Soviet history of closed administrative-territorial formations of the nuclear industry through the prism of trauma research opens up new perspectives in understanding their development.

The Columbine High School shooting of 1999 has become a cultural icon for school shootings in the United States and beyond. Still, there are only a few cinematic adaptations of it. This article addresses how these movies nonetheless impact the culture of remembering Columbine. It argues that films about Columbine use different strategies to mediate the trauma of the shooting that are closely related to framing or recreating trauma. In addition, as traumatic events such as Columbine often lack clear causes and effects, this article will argue that film is particularly effective in mediating trauma.

Biblical scholars are divided regarding the presence of Deuteronomistic theology in Psalms 44, 74, 80 and 89. This article re-examines this issue through the lens of trauma and argues for two points. Firstly, Psalms 44, 74, 80 and 89 do not reject Deuteronomistic theology because the accusations of God in these psalms do not indicate attribution of responsibility but demonstrate trauma victims’ negative cognition and emotion associated with the traumatic event. Secondly, the concept of post-traumatic growth (PTG) helps to clarify two crucial elements of Deuteronomistic theology concerning divine retribution and divine promise. Psalms 44 and 74 assume the first element; Psalms 80 and 89 presuppose the second. Contribution: This article provides a fresh angle from trauma studies to approach biblical texts in the Hebrew Bible, clarifying the connection between Deuteronomistic theology and communal laments.

Félix Guattari, in his ecosophical work The Three Ecologies, urges us to contemplate and, most importantly, to live transversally with the entangled ecologies of nature and culture/society. Specifically, he states that "it is simply wrong to regard action on the psyche, the socius, and the environment as separate;" particularly, he adds, when it comes to the "simultaneous degradation of the three areas." Guattari's transversal process is more accurate than ever if we consider how human activity, in the context of the current geological epoch -- the Anthropocene -- has sent the Earth's natural ecosystems into a tailspin; into a course of environmental, social, and psychical post- and pre-traumatic syndrome of entanglements of trauma(s). At this moment, what roles do documentaries play in penetrating the geological scars of the becoming-traumatized Earth? How can they convey our transversal and posthuman understanding of the entanglements of traumas? More specifically, how do we consider the ecological disasters that have already occurred and have yet to occur on Earth as entangled human and non-human traumas, respecting that also the Earth-others have been undergoing a process of traumatization? As the entanglements of the traumatic syndrome are an ongoing, impeding, and imminent processual (and imaginative) catastrophe that has not yet happened, thus proclaiming a condition here defined as "pre-trauma," how do we re-think trauma through a temporal lens which incorporates the notion of pre-trauma? The proposition of this paper is to transversally think about the entanglements of trauma(s) by initiating a conversation between posthumanism, canonical trauma studies, and contemporary documentary ecologies in order to specifically disclose how it is necessary to radically question and renovate our perspectives on trauma and its temporal dimension(s), finally acknowledging the intermeshed amalgam of our terrestrial existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about psychopathology of Holocaust survivors and the transmission of this terrible trauma to their offsping. The purpose of this article is to discuss this two points: 1) The complex, articulated and sometimes contradictory elements that emerge from the scientific and clinical literature, that is if all the Holocaust survivors are traumatized and to what extent. An examination of the literature seems to show two different Groups: the one of those “self-referred” who have actively asked for help or for psychological support or with clear mental illness, and the one of those who have not seeked help or manifested clear mental illness. The two different populations (“clinical” or “systematic selected by the empirical research”) can explain the different results of the evaluation of the effects of the trauma; 2) The developmental sequelae of Trauma across Generations. About this second point on the transmission of trauma, the proposal of the Authors relates to the integrative, multifactorial, point of view that includes psychodynamic, sociocultural, family system, biological and attachment perspectives, which explains that the trauma itself is not directly “passed on” to second and third generations, but mitigating or aggravating factors can modulate the sequelae of the transmission.

Copyright of Alizes is the property of Universite de la Reunion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Broadly speaking, the literary history of human–nonhuman metamorphoses conveys certain ethics regarding human-to-human relations by mediating these relations through metaphors of inhumanity. Where such transformations appear in the literature of the present, however, the human is often decentered, fostering an uneasy consort between human and nonhuman beings and ways of being. Taking the fiction of South Korean author, Han Kang, as a case study, this essay examines the political or civic value of reinvigorating vegetal or arboreal transformation in contemporary stories that unfold against a backdrop of global climate change and ecological collapse. I argue that Han's work depicts the mimicry of or engagement with nonhuman forms of life as both passive strategies for resisting human acts of violence and exploitation and alternative models of sociality and care. Drawing especially on the unruliness of plants and non-animal organic matter, Han's translated works invite readers to consider what human subjects can learn about both individual and networked, interspecies modes of protest from green subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution will examine different communicative and narrative strategies adopted by some documentary productions in order to visualize something invisible, like the virus and its effects. Through the case studies I will take into account, my intent is to reflect upon the pandemic narration, which replaces or alternates the photographic realism of the images of pain and suffering, intended as scientific and incontrovertible proof of the virus manifestation, with a modernist narrative, mixing interviews with infographic material, maps, dashboards, photomicrographs, and computer graphics animations. Despite their profound mediation by software that makes pictures out of numbers, these informatic images, reported daily in news channels and broadcasts as well, besides shaping the relationships between scientific research, documentary, and its explanatory and pedagogical power to narrate, reconfigure the collective imagination of the pandemic in a bioinformation era.

The study examines from a historical-psychological perspective the suffering faced by the victims of the Spanish Civil War in emotional, social, economic and living conditions generally incompatible with the simplest exercise of recovery from trauma. The victims, unlike the victors, who used and abused their right to mourn and honour their fallen, were forced to swallow their tears and grief, to hide or deny their ideas, to be ashamed of their ideological condition, to impose an iron silence on themselves; in short, to drown their own memory and with it any possibility of mourning or recovering from the horrors of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Found at the crossroads between aesthetics and referentiality, portraiture is a hybrid form of painting conflating inner and outer references. Although the perceived connection and ‘likeness’ between work of art and the subject being depicted seems to differentiate portraiture from other kinds of paintings, this relationship to a perceived reality is far from linear, particularly so when portraits or other works of art are represented in literature – a longstanding literary device known as ekphrasis. The present article will demonstrate how literary representations of portraiture (more specifically, of self-portraiture) can be used to symbolise a narrative’s underlying themes and motifs, namely, in Margaret Atwood’s 'Cat’s Eye' (1988) and Ana Teresa Pereira’s 'As Rosas Mortas' (1998). Elaine and Marisa, Atwood and Pereira’s first-person narrators, are both painters creating and describing a variety of self-portraits inspired by childhood trauma, fragmented memories, and the subconscious mind. Artistic self-expression becomes, in these novels, the distorted and indirect medium through which Elaine and Marisa question, integrate, and accept the traumatic and, at times, the monstrous within. This article will compare Atwood and Pereira’s use of ekphrasis and examine how fictional self-portraits can be used to explore the relationship between subject and self-representation – an essentially fragmented and unstable relationship, especially so for survivors of trauma.

Starting from Hirsch and Smith’s concept of a feminist counterhistory and referencing the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this paper undertakes a (re)reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as construction of gendered countermemory. Such an interpretation would enable a recognition of the political function of the novel as an identity matrix of African-American womanhood. Expanding upon the classical, post-Lacanian approach to trauma studies and its post-colonial reconfigurations, I use a poststructuralist framing of collective trauma, and the Saussurian concept of signification, to highlight the struggle for self-determination of an oppressed community as it is signified-upon by its oppressors through violently imposed discourse. I further question the complicity between conventional forms of narration and the hegemony of an external signifier, and I trace this patterned mechanism of aggression within the linguistic and diegetic fabric of the novel, in order to expose Hurston’s literary methodology of collective memorialization and the way it challenges canonical representations of trauma.

The Memorial of Pain – a TV series comprising 208 episodes – is a memorable documentary produced by the Romanian journalist-filmmaker Lucia Hossu-Longin, which assembles interviews with witnesses and actual victims, and testimonials to the horrors of prisons, forced labour concentration camps, Romanian Securitate’s repressive actions during the communist period, as well as to the atrocities suffered by those suspected of acting against the regime, especially intellectuals. Studies have estimated that two million Romanians were victims of the communist regime, experiencing deportation, confinement to political psychiatric asylums, killings in camps and prisons, imprisonment of war, etc. The present article focuses on the discourse of trauma, while attempting to foreground recurring themes in a set of six, randomly chosen episodes. Moreover, it aims at highlighting linguistic mediation (or the process whereby emotions, traumas, suffering are transferred into discourse) and the associated strategies and symbols which support it. Since emphasis on sociolinguistic topics such as conflict, violence, suffering, traumatic experiences, survivors (frequently taking shape through symbols) is deemed necessary in analyzing mediation (equally viewed as the dialectics between the singular and the collective), the article will look into their representation also.

This study focuses on examining a specific artwork of a member of the Austrian action group of Viennese Actionism, Günter Brus through the prism of Trauma Studies. The research question of how the trauma of World War II expressed itself in the art of Günter Brus encompasses a focus on three sub-areas based on the nature and definition of trauma and following neurosis/psychosis: individual trauma (e.g., childhood trauma), societal trauma (a consequence of WWII), and the return of trauma if it has not been consistently processed. The experience of WWII left traumas in the generation of artists such as Brus (e.g., his experience of bombing at an early age) that were individual, society-wide (the complicity of the whole Austrian society in the Nazi crimes and the Shoa), and/or the traumas caused by some recurring trauma. According to a British theatrologist Patrick Duggan, trauma on the individual level is doubled upon recurrence, which is similar to the conclusion at which German researcher Gerald Schröder arrives when he writes about the Wiederholungstrauma of a society on the whole. When the level of social traumatisation reaches a borderline level, it manifests itself through various valves, including artistic ones. Günter Brus became such a materialisation of the repetition of trauma, a living reminder, literally walking through the streets of Vienna during his event Vienna Walk. The study introduces and describes the nature of such trauma in the artwork of the Austrian post-war artist through the framework of Duggan’s methodology coupled with trauma-related symptomatology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problematics of trauma and testimony are perforce in a closely-knit relation with the issue of evil, in particular with the strand of evil that made possible the concentration camps in Auschwitz. Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym will be considered as primarily an event of speech, and its testimony as a mode of truth’s realization beyond what is available as statement. What emerges from the comments on Pym, from the explication of some of the death scenes, from the gratuitousness of the violence, and the nonchalance of Pym’s report, is not the horror, but a sense of the casualness of death, the “banality of evil” that Poe opposes to the “grandeur of evil,” looking ahead to Auschwitz and the Gulag. In Pym, Poe presents us with a rare instantiation of pure (and banal) evil in the casually-reported scene of the cannibalization. I intend to supplement the philosophical response to the question of (banal) evil provided by Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben by a psychoanalytical one, with a footing in the signature terminology of Melanie Klein.

This paper examines the urban space as an ecology of anxiety in post-9/11 literature. After the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima in August 1945, survivors testified of experiencing prior to the bombing an anticipatory trauma known as bukimirooted in the belief that a catastrophic event was forthcoming. Paul K. Saint-Amour suggests that similar experiences to bukimi are not exclusive to the residents of Hiroshima but came to structure post-war urban experience as a result of a nuclear condition wrought by the Cold War. My paper explores whether a contemporary bukimi can be identified in post-9/11 literature. The post-9/11 novel—works which directly or indirectly acknowledge the terrorist attacks—present familiar but ambiguous forms of risk engendered by the threat of terrorism and maintained in the form of an urban-originated anxiety. This anxiety is rooted in the spectre of an event that’s never total or conclusive—an event that promises witness testimony and the maintenance of traumatic memories, but which also eclipses calamitous structures (like global warming) that are gradual and continuous. To unravel this contemporary species of bukimi, my paper examines depictions of the urban space in the post-9/11 literature of Foer and McEwan.

A partire dalle riflessioni di Adriana Cavarero nel saggio "Inclinazioni, Critica della rettitudine", l’articolo propone una rilettura di Variazioni belliche: l'io poetico rosselliano è un soggetto vulnerabile, "inclinato" verso gli altri, gli emarginati, gli ultimi, "i poveri e i malati di mente" con i quali si identifica proprio perché ne condivide il destino. Quella di Rosselli è una scrittura del trauma che rivendica la necessità di un’etica relazionale che si opponga alla logica capitalista e patriarcale della violenza.

Recycled, re-engineered and transformed pornography has often been appropriated by many of the industrial music movement's female personalities who are invested in an anti-censorship discourse. This contrasts with the dominant form of feminism in the 1970s, which railed against the depiction of all aspects of sexuality. Artists Cosey Fanni Tutti, Lisa Carver, Diamanda Galás, Mïrka Lugosi, Antal Nemeth, Diana Rogerson and Jill Westwood challenged the codes of male domination by reconfiguring gender and overturning the violence perpetrated by men within the industrial movement. Following the artistic and cultural context of the 1970s and 1980s, such issues gave rise to the radical performances that are discussed throughout this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is anyone listening out there? The artists who write and produce radio dramas believe that a limitless imaginative world is possible. Radio drama is the most flexible of forms, allowing a freedom to experiment usually inhibited by considerations of space, time, and money in live theatre. It is no coincidence that the experimental nature of Caryl Phillips’s radio plays fits perfectly into Brater’s idea of “performative voice” (Brater 1994). Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1985), in particular, illustrates the necessity of filling silence with something, anything at all, by telling the Africans’ trade story and trauma created by way of soundscaping sounds, pauses and silences.

Engaging scholarship pointing to the neocolonial patterns of perception built into East-West relations before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain, as well as compelling questions pertaining to the quasi-colonial status of the countries beyond the Iron Curtain vis-à-vis the Soviet Empire, this paper will focus on the manner in which (post)communist identity in fact forms at the intersection of these sometimes competing, sometimes complementary scenarios of power. Moreover, drawing on Caruth’s and Tal’s work, this paper will suggest ways in which the discourse developed in the field of Trauma Studies holds explanatory and potentially reconciliatory power, as it enables the audience to voice the series of missed or misunderstood encounters that are so often at the buried origin of disturbing memories/memoirs of Eastern Europe (or Romania) in Western (or American) discourse, thus pointing out ways in which interpretative tropes developed in Trauma Studies can be explanatory paradigms that shed light on both (post)communist and Balkan identity discourse. More particularly, invoking a series of early writings on postcommunist identity as well as critical inquiries into Balkanizing or Orientalizing discourse, this paper will explore how one can trace the transformation of individual encounters with (post)communist trauma into collective and then historical memory by borrowing from the field of Trauma Studies the analysis of mechanisms of repetition hovering around the site of trauma.

This paper examines the urban space as an ecology of anxiety in post-9/11 literature. After the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima in August 1945, survivors testified of experiencing prior to the bombing an anticipatory trauma known as bukimi rooted in the belief that a catastrophic event was forthcoming. Paul K. Saint-Amour suggests that similar experiences to bukimi are not exclusive to the residents of Hiroshima but came to structure post-war urban experience as a result of a nuclear condition wrought by the Cold War. My paper explores whether a contemporary bukimi can be identified in post-9/11 literature. The post-9/11 novel—works which directly or indirectly acknowledge the terrorist attacks—present familiar but ambiguous forms of risk engendered by the threat of terrorism and maintained in the form of an urban-originated anxiety. This anxiety is rooted in the spectre of an event that’s never total or conclusive—an event that promises witness testimony and the maintenance of traumatic memories, but which also eclipses calamitous structures (like global warming) that are gradual and continuous. To unravel this contemporary species of bukimi, my paper examines depictions of the urban space in the post-9/11 literature of Foer and McEwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we deal with trauma in a posthuman world? The 9th of September 2001 will be remembered as the day the world changed. The turn of the century in the Western world was signaled by this national trauma, but also by a change in the humanist paradigm that very much conditioned the way in which such trauma was experienced and represented. This article explores this intrasection in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Art Spiegelman as they struggle to account for 9/11 through two trauma narratives that signal a matching change in aesthetic approach. Its methodological innovation lies in the application of Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action” to the humanities.

In the present essay, I will take into account some Italian war films made in the 1950s, such as “Carica eroica” (“Heroic Charge”, 1952, Francesco De Robertis), “I sette dell’Orsa maggiore” (“Hell Raiders of the Deep”, 1953, Duilio Coletti), “Mizar - Sabotaggio in mare” (Mizar, 1954, Francesco De Robertis), “Divisione Folgore” (“Folgore Division“, 1954, Duilio Coletti), “La grande speranza” (“Submarine Attack”, 1954, Duilio Coletti) in order to reflect upon their role in building Italy’s memory of its past as well as the perception of Italian war crimes in public opinion. These productions extend a unifying narrative of the war, consolidating the myth of the “good Italian” (“italiani brava gente”). Through the inclusion of the soldier in collective memory by silencing his role as aggressor, Italian combat films participated and consolidated the process of collective amnesia about the fascist regime and how they influenced the way in which Italian viewers constructed a shared sense of the past.

The paper focuses on the way the notion of trauma functions and is justified in the contemporary discourse on history. The author refers to the works of Aleida Assmann and examines the critique brought forward against memorial culture. Deconstructing Assmann's argument, the author concludes that there are two levels of discourse that support and justify each other: the level of fact and the level of value. The first one deals with the problem of traumatic events and expanding memory about them, which is explained as a change of time regime. The second one deals with the ethical turn that made the change of the time regime possible. To analyse historical trauma, the article suggests breaking the connection between these two levels and examining their foundations separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing into focus the ways of how to approach trauma instead of defining the object of research is becoming increasingly important. This also indicates that the range of approaches to trauma that informs cultural inquiry is widening, and is moving away from one singular paradigm posited as universal. Trauma scholars have demonstrated, on the one hand, the importance of particular experiences, specific cases, individual features of experiencing, remembering, and narrating trauma. On the other hand, they have pointed out the impact of cultural "scripts" shaped by broader cultural understandings and social and cultural regulations and preferences that shape the possibilities of the representation of traumatic experience. This special issue seeks to recognize and negotiate the individual and collective dimensions of trauma as well as their interwovenness, with a focus on the (post)-Soviet and Eastern European experience. It does so by addressing the generalizing theoretical models as well as the practical, material, and experimental aspects of trauma. Thus, it seeks to disentangle and clarify the links between the collective and the individual, the theoretical and the practical, and finally, the universal and the specific, the global and the local. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Starting from Hirsch and Smith's concept of a feminist counterhistory and referencing the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this paper undertakes a (re)reading of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as construction of gendered countermemory. Such an interpretation would enable a recognition of the political function of the novel as an identity matrix of African-American womanhood. Expanding upon the classical, post-Lacanian approach to trauma studies and its post-colonial reconfigurations, I use a poststructuralist framing of collective trauma, and the Saussurian concept of signification, to highlight the struggle for self-determination of an oppressed community as it is signified-upon by its oppressors through violently imposed discourse. I further question the complicity between conventional forms of narration and the hegemony of an external signifier, and I trace this patterned mechanism of aggression within the linguistic and diegetic fabric of the novel, in order to expose Hurston's literary methodology of collective memorialization and the way it challenges canonical representations of trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the world went into lockdown (2020) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the streets and places of socialising became deserted – much like in the opening verse of Lamentations. This prompted a desire to re-read this book in light of the pandemic. The question was asked whether this book, set amidst the calamity of the Babylonian captivity and destruction of Jerusalem, can be helpful. Can this book help us make meaning and sense in the face of a new enemy that threatens the world? The article took note of all the necessary interpretations and introductions to the book of Lamentations and concluded that it can be read as lament and, in particular, communal lament. The language of lament, sometimes lost in a world of technology and positivity, can be helpful to verbalise loss and trauma. This elicited a discussion of trauma and biblical studies, and how they interact. Much of literature that originated in traumatic circumstances became ‘meaning-making literature’. It was the case with Lamentations back in the wake of 586 BCE and also in many other instances when the book was re-read. This article provided examples of these instances. The invitation was then accepted to read some of the verses in Lamentations through the lens of the trauma created by COVID-19, and many similarities were found. Contribution: Although Jerusalem was destroyed by an enemy that could be seen, and COVID-19 is caused by an enemy that cannot be seen, there are many similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the situation in Jerusalem as lamented by Lamentations. As ‘meaning-making literature’, lament is sometimes the only fitting response to the incomprehensible reality of pain and suffering. Lament defies the cheap answers so often given by religion when it is confronted with mystery, doubt and despair. This seemed to be the case in Lamentations. It was concluded that Lamentations can help readers through the process of trauma therapy as it opens the wound and helps the individual to connect with the bigger community in trying to make sense of it all and to involve others in the pain. The newness of the COVID-19 pandemic and a response from an Old Testament perspective, made the scope of this article relevant.

In this article the impact of the Covid-19 virus will be used as a lens to read this Isaianic text. The collective threat of the corona-virus causes trauma on societies and communities on different levels: psychological, physical, existential and communal trauma. Isaiah 7:18–25 also tells us of an historic event which caused extreme trauma to its audience. Verse 18 describes the arrival of the Assyrian army. The prophet compares the Assyrian hosts to the flies “in the rivers of Egypt”, and to the bees in Assyria; that is to say, the invaders will be the innumerable and speedy warriors of the Assyrian king. This portrayal is expanded stating that the flies and the bees will swarm all over the land, penetrate every corner and crack and it will be impossible to get rid of them. The plague of “flies” in the metaphor represents the large numbers, while the “bees” are clearly the aggressive and terrifying ones in this metaphor. Just as the Assyrians, who are about to appear as an unwanted and troublesome multitude of flies and bees from which Ahaz will be unable to free himself and his kingdom, the Covid-19 virus is causing havoc and wreckage to societies all over the world. Contribution: This article reflects theologically on the immense psychological and existential damage of trauma caused by the terrifying and laming fear this virus has on the mental well-being of a society. The theological reflections will engage with a biblical text which also reflects on the traumatic effects of threat and fear that lamed a society.