Search

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.

This article explores the intersection of fairy tales and Holocaust narratives, exploring the emerging trend of presenting Holocaust tales within the fairy-tale genre as a societal response to grappling with Holocaust trauma. Examining linguistic and ethical approaches in works by authors Liz Braswell, Louise Murphy, and Jane Yolen, it poses a central question: does merging Holocaust and fairy-tale narratives enhance understanding or hinder respectful remembrance? The article scrutinises subliminal storytelling in Holocaust tales, highlighting varied authorial approaches, from Braswell's cryptic social conflict to Murphy's and Yolen's use of vague references within a Holocaust-aware context. Exploring how Holocaust tales navigate the balance between fantasy and historical context, it analyses recontextualisation in the works of Braswell and Murphy. Braswell's 'Beauty and the Beast' engages with social conflict and history by transforming the curse, while Murphy's 'Hansel and Gretel' reframes the oven as a symbol of safety. Additionally, the article addresses the ethical dimensions of representing the Holocaust in children's fiction, emphasising the use of fantasy to enhance accessibility and emotional engagement. Analysing works like Yolen's 'Briar Rose' and Braswell's 'Beauty and the Beast' illustrates how these narratives navigate historical representation complexities, aiming to preserve awareness and prompt moral reflections. The article argues that fantasy elements not only render the Holocaust accessible to contemporary readers but also provide a unique avenue for emotional engagement, transcending the limitations of historical facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trauma studies and posthuman studies are two paradigms that became popular in the late twentieth century and have been used to define the culture of our time. Both fields deal with subjectivity, agency, embodiment and the relation with 'the other', viewing subjectivity and the self as shattered and fragmented. However, while trauma studies focuses on the process of acting out and working through to return to a sealed, complete conception of the self, posthuman studies explores the fluidity and interconnectedness that results from the decentralization of human subjectivity in our technological, boundary-blurring reality. This article introduces the concept of the posthuman trauma novel, which delves into the shared sense of vulnerability between trauma and posthumanism and the complex identity dynamics emerging from these paradigms. Formally, these novels favour complex timelines, non-linear narratives, interconnected plotlines, emotional detachment, machine-like narrators and thematic fragmentation, among other strategies. Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking about This (2021) is a representative example of the posthuman trauma novel that navigates virtual and real worlds. Through fragmentation, intrusive images and non-linearity, the novel represents the disintegration of the mind caused by the internet and social media in which the sense of self is engulfed by a collective consciousness emerging from the never-ending scrolling and the juxtapositions between the important and the shallow. It is a real-world trauma that pulls the protagonist out of the virtual world of disembodiment and detachment. While acknowledging the importance of social media and digital technologies, the novel also sees the blurring of digital and physical spaces as a wound of modern subjectivity, a suffering that needs to be worked through to achieve an embodied and embedded conceptualization of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theories and notions around the posthuman have become, in recent years, a key framework to approach contemporary culture and its products. Inspired by the growing cross-disciplinarity in the field of critical posthumanism, as well as by the increased prevalence of posthumanist ideas in North American literature and culture, this Special Issue seeks to map some recent trends regarding the understanding of the posthuman at two different levels: in terms of critical approach and regarding the types of texts explored. Thus, the articles included in this Special Issue resort to the critical tools provided by critical posthumanism, trauma studies, new materialism, transhumanism and digital anthropology, bringing to the fore not just the outstanding critical currency of these disciplines by themselves and their usefulness to approach contemporary artistic products, but also the points of convergence and divergence among them. Apart from their emphasis on cross-disciplinarity, the articles that make up this Special Issue explore a wide breath of cultural products, giving readers a glimpse into the current relevance of posthumanist ideas in the North American literary and cultural scene. At the same time, the contributions in this Special Issue map recent aesthetic and narratological approaches to the posthuman, the non-human and the more-than-human world, pointing to posthumanism as a constantly evolving field. Overall, the articles bring together the most recent scholarship within the fast-changing field of critical posthumanism and explore different twenty-first-century understandings of the posthuman subject at a time when the task of (re)defining what it means to be human is perhaps more pressing than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the profound impact of trauma on Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, specifically focusing on how her experiences of abuse and abandonment contribute to symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The research situates Catherine's psychological struggles within the broader context of Trauma Studies, utilizing theories of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to interpret her behaviors and relationships. The study examines the interplay between Catherine's unresolved trauma and her conflicted relationships, highlighting how these dynamics shape her tragic fate and influence other characters in the novel. The analysis underscores the significance of understanding trauma's psychological effects in literature, offering insights into the complexities of character development and the broader implications for human behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Animal experiments are important in trauma-related studies because they simulate in vivo effects. Rodents are a good choice for preparing trauma models; however, contractile healing in rodents results in a healing pattern that differs considerably from that in humans. Therefore, this study developed a new rodent model that avoids contractile healing of the skin around the wound using an anticontraction ring, and the skin in the wound's center remains intact and acts as a source for epithelialized diffusion healing. Cell proliferation, migration, revascularization, and collagen secretion did not differ between the novel and conventional full-skin defect trauma models. However, the healing rate at various stages significantly differed between the 2 groups owing to differences in the healing patterns. And without effective treatment, the experimental group cannot heal. The stabilities of the novel and conventional methods were good regardless of operator or batch. In summary, this new animal trauma model provides a stable experimental environment similar to that in humans, which may promote trauma-related research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the fraught relationship between the terms 'fiction', 'creativity', 'literature' and 'testimony' in Holocaust and trauma studies. It argues that the main challenge in reading witness literature is to read testimony as both factual and potentially fictional at the same time when no metatextual corroboration is available. This anxiety of testimony originates in some key texts in Holocaust and trauma studies: I analyse for the first time the repercussions of fictional passages in Primo Levi's If This is a Man (1947), The Truce (1963) and Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After (1985). These sections in no way attenuate the veracity of the overall narratives of survival. Rather than presenting the fictional as fact in bad faith, these books demonstrate the importance of creativity in responding to historical events, particularly when there are no existing historical narratives to present an alternative view. They also emphasise the current critical dichotomy in Holocaust and trauma studies between what Sara Guyer terms the 'non-representational character' of literature from 'the representational character of testimony'. If we attempt to think beyond this binary between fictional literature and books about witnessing, it is possible to reflect on how fiction itself can operate as a form of testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst dealing with the health hazards of working during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, many Indian newspaper journalists lost jobs, faced abrupt salary cuts or were forced to go on unpaid leaves leading to mental health challenges that turned into traumatic experiences for some. Qualitative research method was employed to collect data, through semi-structured interviews where consenting participants recollected, narrated and described their traumatic experiences. The authors identified a cohort (n = 37) of Indian newspaper journalists using the purposive sampling method. The study uncovers the details of the emotional distress and traumatic experiences and noted the coping strategies that demonstrated the resilience of many Indian newspaper journalists in the face of a crisis. This study revealed how sudden pandemic-related layoffs, lack of communication and the ineffectiveness or absence of a collective representation body, like journalist unions, aggravated the mental health challenges for many newspaper journalists in India. Findings highlight how mental health challenges at workplaces can be mitigated with support and interventions by qualified mental health professionals, and other mental health support systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The aim of this article is to call for qualitative researchers in education and other human sciences to grapple with recent developments in trauma studies and engage in reconceptualizing their research practices so that they pay attention to the catastrophic effects of colonialism on individuals and communities. Joining other critics who have called for decolonizing trauma studies, I turn to decolonial and postcolonial perspectives to reorient qualitative research practices for the collection and analysis of trauma narratives and suggest a decolonial understanding of trauma in education. In particular, I draw on literature from decolonizing trauma studies to propose two decolonial research orientations for qualitative researchers: (1) Acknowledging the problems of Eurocentric approaches to trauma in education; (2) reinventing research practices that are delinked from Western frameworks of understanding trauma, while embracing "other(ed)" ways of doing research on trauma. Specific examples are provided to show how researchers might advance these orientations. [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]

A popular author in Italy since the late 1990s, Irish writer Catherine Dunne, like Elena Ferrante, has engaged with topics of female emancipation, resistance to patriarchal values, and the mother-daughter relationship, among others. The popular and critical acclaim Dunne's narrative has received in Italy — with her debut novel predating Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment (2002) and her subsequent work anticipating many Ferrantean themes — begs for a thorough comparative appraisal of these two authors' oeuvres. In this article, Ferrara first shows how Dunne's debut novel In the Beginning and her second novel A Name for Himself anticipate important themes and tropes explored by Ferrante in her narrative, including the concept of smarginatura or dissolving margins. Secondly, Ferrara identifies the central place that grief and grievability play in both authors' non-anthropocentric, anti-patriarchal poetics and in the construction of their female subjects. Through the lens of trauma studies and posthumanist theory, the paper reveals how Dunne and Ferrante's characters overcome abandonment and loss through a productive interconnection with nonhuman objects and entities that are signifiers of grief, such as photographs, dolls and stuffed animals. The analysis concludes with a comparative case-study of Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels (2011–2014) and Dunne's The Years that Followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that McGahern embodies a tension between nostalgia and anti-nostalgia through the silence of characters of a postmemory generation. Although McGahern neither pushes the limit of his works to the realm of political emancipation, nor pursues therapeutic working-through of trauma, he is an artist whose quest for postmemorial dynamics functions both anti-nostalgically as a traumatic symptom of the authoritative post-independence state, and nostalgically as an aesthetic strategy to reinvent the past. First, he describes silence as generational, representing both the space for a tentative truce between the generations and the means by which the postmemory generation can establish its critical identity. Second, McGahern's silence enables his postmemory-generation characters to reinvent the past. On the one hand, the silence reveals intragenerational memory war among members of the later generation as they form different versions of the past. On the other, the silence serves as a creative space for reflective nostalgia to reimagine, and cope with, the trauma of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In film scholarship, historical film has been identified as a form that portrays events and experiences that took place in the past. By building on Caruth's concept of indirect representation, however, this article identifies a new historical film form that is not necessarily set in the past, but engages with questions regarding history, memory and historical representation. It conceptualizes this new form of 'historical essay film', and by analysing Voice of My Father, argues that rather than manifesting a desire to represent traumatic events directly, historical essay films refrain from the presumption that the medium of film can represent the reality of past events. To this end, they engage with past traumas indirectly through narratives that are set in the present day. The study further contends that the main thrust of historical essay films is to probe the discursive fields in which certain moments of the past are fixed, narrated and become predominant while others remain overlooked and unaccounted for. The article concludes with the claim that, as a consequence of their unconventional formal structures, historical essay films diminish the temporal distance between the past, present and future while also opening up new possibilities for rethinking what historical representation means. [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.

In both content and form, the comic 'Closure', written by Laura Findlay and illustrated by Zuzanna Dominiak, advances a notably complex view of the subject of trauma, and of the way comics can best portray this subject. Far from offering straightforward, easily summarized data on trauma, the creators enact a conflict between word and image, and between writer and illustrator, to explain how and why the topic of trauma resists easy summary, and to present comics as a powerful medium for expressing this complexity. Referencing the work of Art Spiegelman, especially his use of gag humour and satire, 'Closure' claims a place for comics, not as an easy way to absorb difficult information, but precisely as a way to capture and amplify its difficulty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Stanisław Lem's early prose works, which were written shortly after the end of World War II. In light of the institutional state censorship of the time, the traumatic experience of the 1941 Lviv [then Lwów] pogrom and Lem's attempts at survival outside the Lviv ghetto, this article offers a broad historical, biographical, and political context for the interpretation of these early works, revealing political allusions and autobiographical motifs. This research takes the archival turn, which places the archive at the center of the study of power, memory, and politics. Careful study of Lem's biography reveals the violent interference of the directives of the oppressive state as well as its politics of memory, and allows the voice of the victims and the defeated to become audible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Trauma studies has its foundation in the psychoanalytic theory of Freud. However, the 1990s saw an upsurge in the discourse of trauma studies in literature especially with the influential study of Cathy Caruth. Over the years, trauma studies has thrived and been applied in the interdisciplinary discuss of race, feminism, ecology and globalization. This paper explores the narratives of trauma in two Nigerian plays. It goes beyond the concept of "trauma unspeakable"(Caruth 1994) to investigate the impact of institutionalized violence on the vulnerable group of women and children. Based on Literary trauma theory and psychoanalytic theory, the paper offers a diversity of interpretation to women's experiences of loss, displacement, and trauma in Soji Cole's Embers and Iyorwuese Hagher's Lamp of Peace. It finds that events of violence and inequality impacts the lived experiences of the characters differently and the ways in which it is captured in literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

This article considers traumatic representations of violence in the stories of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi that do not readily fit into trauma studies discourses which emphasise the aporia and unspeakability of trauma. Instead, the protagonists of these stories gesture towards defiance and agency in the face of trauma, thereby calling for justice and social change. Such portrayals offer us opportunities to decolonize cultural trauma theory by focusing on the unexpected arising of agency and empowerment from victims of gendered violence. The article explores the complex ways in which the trope of rape operates in Devi's work and posits that it is used by Devi to empower her female protagonists and make them powerful critiques of patriarchal systems of exploitation. In doing so, the article argues, these stories also decolonize established discourses of trauma. In "Draupadi", the protagonist Dopdi Mejhen is a tribal revolutionary who is arrested and gang-raped in custody. In "Behind the Bodice", Gangor, a Dalit woman, is gang-raped by policemen. In these stories, rape functions at two levels: firstly, it functions as a critique of the stark reality and extent of the violence perpetrated daily on the bodies of women; secondly, it works as a trope in which the violation of the woman's body becomes symptomatic of the violation of the land and its oppressed people by the ruling elite under decolonization. Thus, rape in Devi's fiction can be read allegorically as a critique from within of nationalism and decolonization. By constituting the female subaltern as a complex figure of femininity whose body is not simply the site of exploitation and torture, but a transformative figure of resistance, Devi's fiction radically destabilizes the basic premise of female vulnerability and the violent objectification of women in the context of rape as well as the expected traumatic aftermath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The contemporary Italian comics artist and author Gipi offers us a narrative approach that speaks to, and for, the twenty-first century. He uses a multi-planed presentation of events that allows for memory and history to be pluri-temporal and pluri-vocal. Gipi's storytelling navigates a path through micro-histories and history, as he effectively reinserts individual memories and experiences into our continual recreation and reinterpretation of the past. His technique brings together an amalgam of voices and perspectives, real and imagined, that remain distinct yet melded together in his reconstruction and retelling of events. Ultimately, it responds to the question of how we can reimagine and recount history, and comments on the ethical implications of our involvement in the making of history. [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.