Beyond Testimony and Trauma

Beyond Testimony and Trauma PDF Author: Steven High
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774828951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Survivors of terrible events are often portrayed as unsung heroes or tragic victims but rarely as complex human beings whose lives extend beyond the stories they have told. Beyond Testimony and Trauma considers other ways to engage with survivors and their accounts based on insights gained from long-term oral history projects in a variety of contexts, including factory closures, industrial injury, eugenics and forced sterilization, the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, Argentinian torture camps, the Yugoslav Wars, and Jewish emigration from the Maghreb. The contributors, all innovators in the field of oral history, include Henry Greenspan who provides reflections from forty years of listening to Holocaust survivors as well as an insightful afterword. They demonstrate that – through deep listening, long-term relationship building, and collaborative research design – it is possible to move beyond the problematic aspects of “testimony” to shine light on the more nuanced lives of survivors of mass violence. In the process, they offer alternative approaches to the collection of oral history that will shake the foundations of current historiographical practice.

Beyond Testimony and Trauma

Beyond Testimony and Trauma PDF Author: Steven High
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774828951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389

Get Book Here

Book Description
Survivors of terrible events are often portrayed as unsung heroes or tragic victims but rarely as complex human beings whose lives extend beyond the stories they have told. Beyond Testimony and Trauma considers other ways to engage with survivors and their accounts based on insights gained from long-term oral history projects in a variety of contexts, including factory closures, industrial injury, eugenics and forced sterilization, the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, Argentinian torture camps, the Yugoslav Wars, and Jewish emigration from the Maghreb. The contributors, all innovators in the field of oral history, include Henry Greenspan who provides reflections from forty years of listening to Holocaust survivors as well as an insightful afterword. They demonstrate that – through deep listening, long-term relationship building, and collaborative research design – it is possible to move beyond the problematic aspects of “testimony” to shine light on the more nuanced lives of survivors of mass violence. In the process, they offer alternative approaches to the collection of oral history that will shake the foundations of current historiographical practice.

The Limits of Autobiography

The Limits of Autobiography PDF Author: Leigh Gilmore
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501770780
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
In The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh Gilmore analyzes texts that depict trauma by combining elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory in ways that challenge the constraints of autobiography. Astute and compelling readings of works by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson explore how each poses the questions "How have I lived?" and "How will I live?" in relation to the social and psychic forms within which trauma emerges. First published in 2001, this new edition of one of the foundational texts in trauma studies includes a new preface by the author that assesses the gravitational pull between life writing and trauma in the twenty-first century, a tension that continues to produce innovative and artful means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation.

Witnessing Witnessing

Witnessing Witnessing PDF Author: Thomas Trezise
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823264041
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Witnessing Witnessing focuses critical attention on those who receive the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Questioning the notion that traumatic experience is intrinsically unspeakable and that the Holocaust thus lies in a quasi-sacred realm beyond history, the book asks whether much current theory does not have the effect of silencing the voices of real historical victims. It thereby challenges widely accepted theoretical views about the representation of trauma in general and the Holocaust in particular as set forth by Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, Berel Lang, and Dori Laub. It also reconsiders, in the work of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, reflections on ethics and aesthetics after Auschwitz as these pertain to the reception of testimony. Referring at length to videotaped testimony and to texts by Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, and Jorge Semprun, the book aims to make these voices heard. In doing so, it clarifies the problems that anyone receiving testimony may encounter and emphasizes the degree to which listening to survivors depends on listening to ourselves and to one another. Witnessing Witnessing seeks to show how, in the situation of address in which Holocaust survivors call upon us, we discover our own tacit assumptions about the nature of community and the very manner in which we practice it.

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma PDF Author: Eden Wales Freedman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496827376
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or witnessing—trauma in order to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women and adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature. Eden Wales Freedman articulates a theory of reading (or dual-witnessing) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. She places these original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in African American literature. The volume also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.

On Listening to Holocaust Survivors

On Listening to Holocaust Survivors PDF Author: Henry Greenspan
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
How do Holocaust survivors find words and voice for their memories of terror and loss? This landmark book presents striking new insights into the process of recounting the Holocaust. While other studies have been based, typically, on single interviews with survivors, this work summarizes twenty years of the author's interviews and reinterviews with the same core group. In this book, therefore, survivors' recounting is approached—not as one-time testimony—but as an ongoing, deepening conversation. Listening to survivors so intensively, we hear much that we have not heard before. We learn, for example, how survivors perceive us, their listeners, and the impact of listeners on what survivors do, in fact, retell. We meet the survivors themselves as distinct individuals, each with his or her specific style and voice. As we directly follow their efforts to recount, we see how Holocaust memories challenge their words even now—burdening survivors' speech, distorting it, and sometimes fully consuming it. It is not a story, insisted one survivor about his memories. It has to be made a story. On Listening to Holocaust Survivors shows us both the ways survivors can make stories for the not-story they remember and—just as important—the ways they are not able to do so.

Testimony

Testimony PDF Author: Shoshana Felman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135206031
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
In this unique collection, Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub examine the nature and function of memory and the act of witnessing, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust. Moving from the literary to the visual, from the artistic to the autobiographical, and from the psychoanalytic to the historical, the book defines for the first time the trauma of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing "the unprecedented historical occurrence of...an event eliminating its own witness." Through the alternation of a literary and clinical perspective, the authors focus on the henceforth modified relation between knowledge and event, literature and evidence, speech and survival, witnessing and ethics.

Testimony and Trauma

Testimony and Trauma PDF Author: Amanda Hontz Drury
Publisher: Fortress Academic
ISBN: 9781978707726
Category : Abused women
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
Jesus' crucifixion was a traumatic event. After Jesus' resurrection, the disciples were both astonished and terrified--Jesus was no longer dead, but the wounds from the crucifixion were still etched in his body. The return of Jesus was supposed to be a joyous occasion, but the trauma of the weekend's events nevertheless creeped into the space following the resurrection. The resurrection story is one of betrayal, denial, beatings, public rejection, humiliation, and execution. Experiences like this do not disappear from memory. Christ has died, Christ is risen, but trauma will come again. Testimony and Trauma explores the Christian practice of testimony through the lens of articulation theory in order to facilitate healing.

Witnessing Witnessing

Witnessing Witnessing PDF Author: Thomas Trezise
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823250448
Category : Holocaust survivors
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This study focuses critical attention on those who receive the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Questioning the notion that traumatic experience is intrinsically unspeakable and that the Holocaust thus lies in a quasi-sacred realm beyond history, the book asks whether much current theory does not have the effect of silencing the voices of real historical victims. It thereby challenges widely accepted theoretical views about the representation of trauma in general and the Holocaust in particular.

Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma

Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma PDF Author: Clara Mucci
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429911416
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The book combines for the first time attachment theory, regulation attachment therapy, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma, showing how the clinical therapeutic process of "going beyond trauma" may result in forgiveness of past relationships and other reparatory practices in which self and other, both internal and external, are integrated and reconnected, opening the subject to creativity and new meaning in life. From early relational trauma to abuse and neglect, to massive social trauma such as war and genocide, the most recent psychoanalytic theories on trauma highlight the relevance of attachment on one side and intergenerational transmission of trauma on the other. The appropriate psychoanalytic treatment of traumatisation of human origin therefore needs to address the specific relational issues, trying to repair precisely the connection between self and other, thanks to the clinician's active participation in the exchange.

Trauma and Recovery

Trauma and Recovery PDF Author: Judith Lewis Herman
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465098738
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.