Writing History, Writing Trauma

Writing History, Writing Trauma PDF Author: Dominick LaCapra
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421414015
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
An updated edition of a major work in trauma studies. Trauma and its aftermath pose acute problems for historical representation and understanding. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra critically analyzes attempts by theorists and literary critics to come to terms with trauma and with the crucial role post-traumatic testimonies—notably Holocaust testimonies—assume in thought and in writing. These attempts are addressed in a series of six interlocking essays that adapt psychoanalytic concepts to historical analysis, while employing sociocultural and political critique to elucidate trauma and its aftereffects in culture and in people. This updated edition includes a substantive new preface that reconsiders some of the issues raised in the book.

Stories Are What Save Us

Stories Are What Save Us PDF Author: David Chrisinger
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421440806
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A foreword by former soldier and memoirist Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country, and an afterword by military wife and memoirist Angela Ricketts, author of No Man's War: Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife, bookend the volume.

Trauma in First Person

Trauma in First Person PDF Author: Amos Goldberg
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253030218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
An examination of what can be learned by looking at the journals and diaries of Jews living during the Holocaust. What are the effects of radical oppression on the human psyche? What happens to the inner self of the powerless and traumatized victim, especially during times of widespread horror? In this bold and deeply penetrating book, Amos Goldberg addresses diary writing by Jews under Nazi persecution. Throughout Europe, in towns, villages, ghettos, forests, hideouts, concentration and labor camps, and even in extermination camps, Jews of all ages and of all cultural backgrounds described in writing what befell them. Goldberg claims that diary and memoir writing was perhaps the most important literary genre for Jews during World War II. Goldberg considers the act of writing in radical situations as he looks at diaries from little-known victims as well as from brilliant diarists such as Chaim Kaplan and Victor Kemperer. Goldberg contends that only against the background of powerlessness and inner destruction can Jewish responses and resistance during the Holocaust gain their proper meaning. “This is a book that deserves to be read well beyond Holocaust studies. Goldberg’s theoretical insights into “life stories” and his readings of law, language and what he calls the “epistemological grey zone” . . . provide a stunning antidote to our unthinking treatment of survivors as celebrities (as opposed to just people who have suffered terrible things) and to the ubiquity of commemorative platitudes.” —Times Higher Education “Every decade or so, an exceptional volume is born. Provocative and inspiring, historian Goldberg’s volume is one such work in the field of Holocaust studies. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Amos Goldberg’s Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust is an important and thought-provoking book not only on reading Holocaust diaries, but also on what that reading can tell us about the extent of the destruction committed against Jews during the Holocaust.” —Reading Religion “Amos Goldberg’s work offers an innovative approach to the subject matter of Holocaust diaries and challenges well-established views in the whole field of Holocaust studies. This is a comprehensive discussion of the phenomenon of Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust and after.” —Guy Miron. Author of The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary “This is an important contribution to trauma studies and a powerful critique of those who use the “crisis” paradigm to study the Holocaust.” —Dovile Budryt, Georgia Gwinnett College, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

History, Literature, Critical Theory

History, Literature, Critical Theory PDF Author: Dominick LaCapra
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801467764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander's two-volume, prizewinning history Nazi Germany and the Jews. A recurrent motif of the book is the role of the sacred, its problematic status in sacrifice, its virulent manifestation in social and political violence (notably the Nazi genocide), its role or transformations in literature and art, and its multivalent expressions in "postsecular" hopes, anxieties, and quests. LaCapra concludes the volume with an essay on the place of violence in the thought of Slavoj Zizek. In LaCapra's view Zizek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence."

Imaginary Neighbors

Imaginary Neighbors PDF Author: Dorota Glowacka
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803205996
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Imaginary Neighbors offers a unique and significant contribution to the contemporary debate concerning Holocaust memory by exploring the most important current political topic in Poland: Jewish-Polish relations during and after World War II.

The Future of Memory

The Future of Memory PDF Author: Richard Crownshaw
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845458478
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Memory studies has become a rapidly growing area of scholarly as well as public interest. This volume brings together world experts to explore the current critical trends in this new academic field. It embraces work on diverse but interconnected phenomena, such as twenty-first century museums, shocking memorials in present-day Rwanda and the firsthand testimony of the victims of genocidal conflicts. The collection engages with pressing ‘real world’ issues, such as the furor around the recent 9/11 memorial, and what we really mean when we talk about ‘trauma’.

Performing Pain

Performing Pain PDF Author: Maria Cizmic
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199734607
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Time after time, people turn to music when coping with traumatic life events. Music can help process emotions, interpret memories, and create a sense of collective identity. In Performing Pain, author Maria Cizmic focuses on the late 20th century in Eastern Europe as she uncovers music's relationships to trauma and grief. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a cultural preoccupation in this region with the meanings of historical suffering, particularly surrounding the Second World War and the Stalinist era. Journalists, historians, writers, artists, and filmmakers frequently negotiated themes related to pain and memory, truth and history, morality and spirituality during glasnost and the years leading up to it. Performing Pain considers how works by composers Alfred Schnittke, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Part, and Henryk Gorecki musically address contemporary concerns regarding history and suffering through composition, performance, and reception.Taking theoretical cues from psychology, sociology, and literary and cultural studies, Cizmic offers a set of hermeneutic essays that demonstrate the ways in which people employ music in order to make sense of historical traumas and losses. Seemingly postmodern compositional choices--such as quotation, fragmentation, and stasis--create musical analogies to psychological and emotional responses to trauma and grief, and the physical realities of their embodied performance focus attention on the ethics of pain and representation. Furthermore, as film music, these works participate in contemporary debates regarding memory and trauma. A comprehensive and innovative study, Performing Pain will fascinate scholars interested in the music of Eastern Europe and in aesthetic articulations of suffering.

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature

A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature PDF Author: W. Lawrence Hogue
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1785272616
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
This book reconfigures the history of modern America, showing how multiple and, at times, vulnerable social, economic, literary, and political movements, levels, divisions, and conditions such as the emergent middle class, the labor movement, the Progressive Movement, the socialist and communist parties, the Women’s movements, the NAACP, the Garvey movement, Asian and Native American resistance movements, writers, artists, and intellectuals seized upon social, gender, economic, and racial inequalities and challenged a singularly defined modern America. This book re-represents the modern American novel, accenting the different critical literary voices that come out of the mainstream consumer society but also out of the various unequal social, economic, gender, and political movements and situations. In including racial, gender, sexual, colonial, class, and ethnic others—who reject the rigidity, the repression, the racial and ethnic stereotyping, the external and internal colonialism, the complication/rejection of the past/nature, and the violence of the institutionalized, conformist norm—in a discussion of the modern American novel, it effects a fundamental recasting of the modern Americanist paradigm, one that is de-centered, richer, more complex, and more diverse.

Turning Points and Transformations

Turning Points and Transformations PDF Author: Christine DeVine
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443832367
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
From the Irish Cailleach and other shape-shifters of folk legends to modern movie “transformers”; from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the moment when Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find himself transformed into an insect in Kafka’s novella; from conversion narratives to slave narratives, turning points and transformations have always been central to literary works and to cultural developments. In fact, with Freytag’s pyramid in mind, one could claim that all literary works focus on the trope of a transformation born of a turning point, because such moments comprise the very essence and vitality of human life and culture. But why are turning points necessarily transformational and in what way? And what brings about those turning points in language, literature, culture and human lives? These are essentially the questions the essays in this volume seek to answer. The contributors examine turning points and transformations – personal, literary and cultural – brought about through the randomness of the universe as well as through human interference, and discuss ways in which humans in general and writers in particular, through their art, experience and cope with the ineluctable results.

The Feeling of Forgetting

The Feeling of Forgetting PDF Author: John Corrigan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022682764X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
A provocative examination of how religious practices of forgetting drive white Christian nationalism. The dual traumas of colonialism and slavery are still felt by Native Americans and African Americans as victims of ongoing violence toward people of color today. In The Feeling of Forgetting, John Corrigan calls attention to the trauma experienced by white Americans as perpetrators of this violence. By tracing memory’s role in American Christianity, Corrigan shows how contemporary white Christian nationalism is motivated by a widespread effort to forget the role race plays in American society. White trauma, Corrigan argues, courses through American culture like an underground river that sometimes bursts forth into brutality, terrorism, and insurrection. Tracing the river to its source is a necessary first step toward healing.