Trauma, Postmodernism and the Aftermath of World War II

Trauma, Postmodernism and the Aftermath of World War II PDF Author: P. Crosthwaite
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230594727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
The first sustained study of the relationship between Anglo-American postmodernist fiction and the Second World War, Crosthwaite demonstrates that postmodernism has not abandoned history but has rather reformulated it in terms of trauma that is traceable, time and again, to the catastrophes of the 1940s.

Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11

Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11 PDF Author: Christina Cavedon
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900430598X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
Applying melancholia as an analytical concept, Christina Cavedon’s Cultural Melancholia: US Trauma Discourses Before and After 9/11 discusses novels by Jay McInerney and Don DeLillo in light of an American cultural malaise pre-dating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature

The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature PDF Author: Iro Filippaki
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030676307
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature provides an interdisciplinary exploration in early medical trauma treatment and the emergent postmodern canon of the 1960s and 1970s. By identifying key postmodern literary tropes (paranoia, uncanniness, biomediation) as products of an overarching post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) narrative paradigm, this concise study reveals unexplored aspects of the canonical novels at hand—such as the link between individual and collective traumatization—highlights the presence of epic elements in postmodern narratives, and identifies the influence of emerging psychiatric treatment on the post-WWII novels at hand. Performing a medical humanities reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), this book introduces a novel way of examining trauma at the intersection of narrative, history, and medicine and recalibrates the importance of postmodern politics of transformation, while making the case for an aesthetics of trauma. By examining the historico-political developments that dictated the formation of PTSD in the wake of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, this book argues that the perception of PTSD symptoms directly influenced aesthetic and literary tropes of the Cold War era.

Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature

Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature PDF Author: Jean-Michel Ganteau
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135104875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Drawing on a variety of theoretical approaches including trauma theory, psychoanalysis, genre theory, narrative theory, theories of temporality, cultural theory, and ethics, this book breaks new ground in bringing together trauma and romance, two categories whose collaboration has never been addressed in such a systematic and in-depth way. The volume shows how romance strategies have become an essential component of trauma fiction in general and traumatic realism in particular. It brings to the fore the deconstructive powers of the darker type of romance and its adequacy to perform traumatic acting out and fragmentation. It also zooms in on the variations on the ghost story as medium for the evocation of trans-generational trauma, as well as on the therapeutic drive of romance that favors a narrative presentation of the working-through phase of trauma. Chapters explore various acceptations and extensions of psychic trauma, from the individual to the cultural, analyzing narrative texts that belong in various genres from the ghost story to the misery memoir to the graphic novel. The selection of primary sources allows for a review of leading contemporary British authors such as Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Sarah Waters and Jeanette Winterson, and of those less canonical such as Jackie Kay, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Justine Picardie, Peter Roche and Adam Thorpe.

Trauma in Contemporary Literature

Trauma in Contemporary Literature PDF Author: Marita Nadal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113473803X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Trauma in Contemporary Literature analyzes contemporary narrative texts in English in the light of trauma theory, including essays by scholars of different countries who approach trauma from a variety of perspectives. The book analyzes and applies the most relevant concepts and themes discussed in trauma theory, such as the relationship between individual and collective trauma, historical trauma, absence vs. loss, the roles of perpetrator and victim, dissociation, nachträglichkeit, transgenerational trauma, the process of acting out and working through, introjection and incorporation, mourning and melancholia, the phantom and the crypt, postmemory and multidirectional memory, shame and the affects, and the power of resilience to overcome trauma. Significantly, the essays not only focus on the phenomenon of trauma and its diverse manifestations but, above all, consider the elements that challenge the aporias of trauma, the traps of stasis and repetition, in order to reach beyond the confines of the traumatic condition and explore the possibilities of survival, healing and recovery.

Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II

Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II PDF Author: Ville Kivimäki
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783030846626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
This book promotes a historically and culturally sensitive understanding of trauma during and after World War II. Focusing especially on Eastern and Central Europe, its contributors take a fresh look at the experiences of violence and loss in 1939–45 and their long-term effects in different cultures and societies. The chapters analyze traumatic experiences among soldiers and civilians alike and expand the study of traumatic violence beyond psychiatric discourses and treatments. While acknowledging the problems of applying a present-day medical concept to the past, this book makes a case for a cultural, social and historical study of trauma. Moving the focus of historical trauma studies from World War I to World War II and from Western Europe to the east, it breaks new ground and helps to explain the troublesome politics of memory and trauma in post-1945 Europe all the way to the present day. This book is an outcome of a workshop project ‘Historical Trauma Studies,’ funded by the Joint Committee for the Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) in 2018–20. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960: Postwar

British Literature in Transition, 1940-1960: Postwar PDF Author: Gill Plain
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107119014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441

Book Description
Examines debates central to postwar British culture, showing the pressures of reconstruction and the mutual implication of war and peace.

Eva Figes' Writings

Eva Figes' Writings PDF Author: Silvia Pellicer-Ortin
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443884804
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
This book provides a general overview of the life and literary career of the prolific writer Eva Figes, placing her extensive production within the various literary movements that have shaped the last century, and drawing on the main features of her works and the different stages in her production. Having recourse to the tools provided by narratology and using the theoretical background of the disciplines of ethics, Holocaust and trauma studies, together with other related fields such as theories of artistic representation, identity questions concerning Jewishness, contemporary history and philosophy, it carries out a comprehensive analysis of Figes’s main works. The main starting hypothesis explored throughout the book is that an evolution may be traced in the aesthetics employed by Figes throughout her career – from her initial Modernist phase to her more realist position – to depict individual and collective traumas. This development is a result of her need to find a mode of representing various traumatic events that have given shape to her personal and family history and to our recent collective history, from the two World Wars and the Holocaust to the social exclusion suffered by minority groups like women or the Jewish immigrant communities. This evolution will be also approached thematically, as there is a development from her early interest in depicting isolated male traumatised characters to the traumas suffered by women under patriarchal structures, and, then, to the encounter with her own suffering as a Holocaust survivor. The author’s evolution in the topics and narrative techniques employed mirrors the different stages in the individual and collective processes of recovery from traumatic experiences, from the process of acting out to the eventual healing phase. Thus, the conclusions detailed here will be useful not only to make Figes’ work known to a wider audience, but also to gain an insight into the evolution of the literary tendencies of the last few decades in trying to represent some of the most horrible events of the modern age.

The Literature of Absolute War

The Literature of Absolute War PDF Author: Nil Santiáñez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108853366
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
This book explores for the first time the literature of absolute war in connection to World War II. From a transnational and comparative standpoint, it addresses a set of theoretical, historical, and literary questions, shedding new light on the nature of absolute war, the literature on the world war of 1939–45, and modern war writing in general. It determines the main features of the language of absolute war, and how it gravitates around fundamental semantic clusters, such as the horror, terror, and the specter. The Literature of Absolute War studies the variegated responses given by literary authors to the extreme and seemingly unsolvable challenges posed by absolute war to epistemology, ethics, and language. It also delves into the different poetics that articulate the writing on absolute war, placing special emphasis on four literary practices: traditional realism, traumatic realism, the fantastic, and catastrophic modernism.

Trauma and Dissociation in the Works and Life of Sebastian Barry

Trauma and Dissociation in the Works and Life of Sebastian Barry PDF Author: Niko Pomakis
Publisher: LIT Verlag
ISBN: 3643964838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Can language and literature cure psychological trauma? If so, what forms do they (have to) take in doing so? When does language hit the wall where the unspeakable mandates silence? And where might literature come in as the rescuing hand by offering forms of expression which are rooted in speech but transcend the merely spoken? This study confronts these issues through the double lenses of Sebastian Barry's œuvre and the complex of dissociative disorders that are at work both in his creative output and the ways in which he fictionalizes dark and traumatic biographical data. Dr. Niko Pomakis has studied Philosophy and English at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) and University College Dublin. He earned his PhD in English Literature at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg.