Papers by Angeliki Tseti
Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, 2024
This article reads Amy Waldman's The Submission focusing on the ways the writer draws directly on... more This article reads Amy Waldman's The Submission focusing on the ways the writer draws directly on architecture's impact on the city's daily life to investigate the forms and shapes of memory as these are reflected in a type of monumental architecture that eschews the competitive flow of memory traversing the nation, thus constituting a site of convergence. Placing special emphasis on the work's particular relevance in the 2020s, The Submission is highlighted for its prescient qualities, as a novel that does not only mirror the division of a wounded nation in the aftermath of the attacks, but also addresses America's state of crisis in the present. More importantly, this article argues that the writer's choice to depict the memorial in ekphrasis insightfully points to the workings of memory as a starting point for America to retrieve its unity, and thus multifariously foresees the legacy of (Post-)9/11 (fiction)'s preoccupations in the immediate future.
American Studies After Postmodernism, 2024
This article discusses the particular qualities of the photo-novel, by way of Emma Donoghue’s Aki... more This article discusses the particular qualities of the photo-novel, by way of Emma Donoghue’s Akin, and proposes its establishment as a form or genre in its own right, a dominant trend in American literary and cultural production of the twenty-first century, particularly relevant to the country’s contemporaneous preoccupation with nationhood. Following a discussion of the traits and workings of the photo-novel, I contend that, far from the postmodernist employment of images as para-textual elements and insistence on fragmentation, these works constitute hybrid, bimedial sites of convergence, where the private and the familial consistently intermingle with the public and the historical. While blurring the boundaries of spatiotemporal specificities and while clearly highlighting an acknowledgement of the country’s ties with regions lying across its borders, the American photo-novel of the twenty-first century rises consequent to the post-9/11 crisis. It reflects the nation’s endeavour to reassess and recalibrate its identity and position in the world by association, kinship and affiliation.
Tatiani G. Rapatzikou and Ludmila Martanovschi (eds). Ethnicity and Gender Debates: Cross-Readings of American Literature and Culture in the New Millennium. Peter Lang. , 2020
This article reads Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008) as a photo-novel seeking to deli... more This article reads Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008) as a photo-novel seeking to delineate the analogies between instances of ethnic violence occurring in America’s past and present, both in the homeland and abroad. Hemon’s narrator seeks to explore his immigrant identity by turning to archival material and fictionally recreating the true story of a refugee arriving in the US at the turn of the 20th century, in the photo-textual mode. The juxtaposition of traumatic experiences of displacement and the photo-textual modus operandi in which these experiences unfold register the trans-cultural quality of American space through the recurrent pattern of xenophobia that consistently permeates it.
Mitsi et al (eds). Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination. Palgrave-MacMillan. , 2019
Taking the lead from Pierre Nora’s perception of sites of memory as lieux “where memory crystalli... more Taking the lead from Pierre Nora’s perception of sites of memory as lieux “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself” (7), this article wishes to discuss the attempt at approaching, perhaps even (re)constructing, the limit historical event, and preserving its memory through—and despite— the absence of mnemonic sites, the effacement of debris and traces, the persistence of aporias and lacunae.
The works chosen for this exploration, a film and a photo-textual memoir respectively, employ visuality and the fragments of witnesses’ or bystanders’ memories as the cardinal aspects of their endeavour to narrate the catastrophe and destruction of European Jews during WWII. Both auteurs (re)turn to the sites of torture and seek to reconstruct the past in and through the present, by highlighting, precisely, the erasure of traces.
This paper wishes to discuss photo-textual autopathography as a narrative model that testifies to... more This paper wishes to discuss photo-textual autopathography as a narrative model that testifies to the ways in which, as per Cathy Caruth, “one’s own trauma is tied up to the trauma of another” (Unclaimed Experience 8), and may thus respond to the challenges of addressing an allegedly unrepresentable traumatic experience, while establishing a nexus of affiliations between different traumatized subjects irrespective of spatiotemporal specificities. As Leigh Gilmore suggests, the construction of an (auto)biographical trauma narrative, where “the portals are too narrow and the demands too restrictive” (The Limits of Autobiography 3), is often performed by an individual narrating their life story through the experiences of others. The Lazarus Project (2008) constitutes an eloquent example of this model, consisting in a disguised autobiography, or a fictional biography of the writer’s doubles, that unfolds on multiple levels. Hemon, a Bosnian writer who was stranded in the US at the outbreak of the war, recounts his narrator’s (Brik)—also a Bosnian refugee—attempts to explore his immigrant identity and work through the traumatic experience of violent expatriation in the present by way of turning to the past and producing a fictional rendition of the events surrounding the death of Lazarus Averbach, an immigrant arriving in the US at the turn of the century. Significantly, these (auto)biographical gestures are performed in photo-textuality, in other words the combination of written text and photography—and its particular, as per Barthes, relation to death—in a relationship of reciprocity and complementarity. As this paper will argue, Lazarus’s thanatography offers a starting point for the writer to address, perhaps even reclaim, his own traumatic experience and foster a sense of a collective identity marked by a history of victimhood. At the same time, Lazarus’s “resurrection” through the privileged medium of photography—namely through the use of the photographic archives of the time—and the juxtaposition of life stories performed, both verbally and pictorially, in Hemon’s fiction may transcend the professed impossibility of representing a collective traumatic experience, as they render trauma life-writing possible through the photo-textual inscription of the death of the other.
The persistent acts of atrocity and persecution already haunting the twenty-first century have be... more The persistent acts of atrocity and persecution already haunting the twenty-first century have been developing on a par with a renewed urgency for practices that may counter the forgetting of the human, break the silences that veil collective historical traumata, and contribute to the surfacing and preservation of the memory of “limit” events of massive extermination and genocide. The oft-proclaimed incommensurability of these events that elude comprehension and resist representation renders the task of addressing and, perhaps even, integrating them within a continuum of traumatic experience particularly challenging. Nevertheless, as Georges Didi-Huberman suggests with reference to the Holocaust, since genocides were conceived and executed, they may not be considered unthinkable; it is imperative, therefore, that, where cognitive processes fail, an alternative route of approaching the event be taken, so that the traumatic experience can be addressed and articulated. Within this context, the present article will be exploring the privileged modes of testimony and the visual, as these are employed in Suzanne Khardalian’s documentary film Grandma’s Tattoos (2011) to discuss and mnemonically reinstate the story of Armenian women that were captured during the genocide and branded with specific nation or religion denotative tattoos, signs of ownership during their captivity and markings of trauma thereafter. While touching upon one of the controversial subjects of genocide studies, namely the importance of gender, I suggest, Khardalian’s film adopts the director’s family story as a point of departure to explore the workings of “postmemory,” as per Marianne Hirsch’s term. Furthermore, by attempting to narrate these stories in the visual mode, and, thus, exploring the potential of the visual to establish affiliative connections, Khardalian addresses the traumatic memory of genocide as a connective thread between the individual and the collective, as well as between the disparate collectivities that comprise “anthropos.”
Grandma’s Tattoos sheds light specifically to the plight of female victims, a distinction which tends to be overseen in scholarly explorations of trauma under the pretext that an act of such excess places the human over gender-oriented narratives. Still, the violation of the female body, and its targeting in the process of the physical destruction of a racial or ethnic group, is a cardinal aspect of the genocidal process. The female body has consistently been employed as a systematised weapon of domination during a genocide, owing to its ability for biological reproduction—integrally connected to the disruption and eradication of the national lineage—and due to the culturally imposed notions of disempowerment of the male victims through the defiling or assimilation of the female population. Furthermore, gender emerges as a determining factor with reference to the traumatised subjects’ working through the experience, specifically in relation to the scarcity of narrations and (non)-dissemination of the traumatic experience. More specifically, as will be discussed, the refusal to narrate and the necessity to secrecy in the cases of female victims of genocide indicates a type of survivor’s guilt that resides not in the act of escaping death per se, but, more literally, in being caught in between the need for survival, and the social stigma consequent to these women’s rescue and attempt at re-integrating into the Armenian society and re-rooting themselves; their becoming, as per human rights activist Odette Bazil, “a subject of shame [and] degradation…a ‘pariah’” (Interview WNN n.p.).
While addressing these matters, Grandma’s Tattoos significantly unfolds around the inherent paradox residing in the female body as the means to exterminate race, but also the source of continuation of life and the medium for the preservation of memory, specifically through the creation of the family, and the special bonds established between the survivors and their offspring, through the workings of “postmemory.” Within the context of familial ties and postmnemonic dynamics, but also in the context of (historical) collective trauma, the bodily mark—in this case the tattoos—emerges as the prevalent visual figuration of the traumatic experience. The marking of the body reflects the incommunicability of the experience—and, by transference, the often unbridgeable gap between survivors and their descendants—since, as Hirsch observes, the image of ruptured skin that “objectifies the victims identifying them as slaves or (concentration camps) prisoners” simultaneously represents an experience that is “ultimately and utterly personal” (The Generation of Postmemory 80). These bodily marks do not only significantly alter the woman’s physical identity, but also exercise a strong impact on the relationship between mothers and daughters, by breaching the process of identification effectuated through bodily resemblance between them and by signifying a radically different history that eventually separates them.
The narrativisation of these women’s experience and the attempt to sustain remembrance through the cinematic mode is consonant to the widely discussed relation of the visual to trauma while also standing in accord with the director’s notion that “documentary film can give access to an experience that cannot be recalled, but that, at the same time, cannot be forgotten” (“Taboos, Tattoos, and Trauma” n.p.). While sequencing and translating the frozen images of the photographs into a series of scenes, and by welding the archival images, family photographs and survivors’ testimonies through filmic representation Khardalian compensates for the fragmentation and occasional lack of cohesion that is characteristic of survivors’ recollections, and “salvage[s] the long-forgotten details from oblivion” (Grandma’s 32:32); the documentary film places these narrations into context, so that the sum of the accounts becomes an integrated whole that may claim its place among the culturally sanctioned narratives of the genocide. Further still, I argue, the narration of the family story through film is tantamount to a gesture towards moving from postmemory to a transcultural, multidirectional or connective type of memory. Thus, by exploring the potential of the visual to establish affiliative connections, the filmic rendition of these women’s plight, while never shedding its specificity and singularity, bears a potential to affectively activate the power of memory to relate, connect and achieve an affective impact that may allow for the transference of these memories to be performed not only through generations, but also through cultures.
This paper reads W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz as a photo-text of trauma and examines the ways in whi... more This paper reads W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz as a photo-text of trauma and examines the ways in which the insertion of photographs in the novel and their interaction with the text disrupt and destabilize the narrative, allowing for a multiplicity of interpretations. The quality and subject matter of the photographs included in the novel, as well as the ambiguity or ambivalence often created by the textual references surrounding them, instigate the viewers/readers to assume the position of a witness and to engage in an elaborate process of meaning-making. In effect, it will be suggested, that the combination of verbal and visual components results in the restoration of witnessing and the construction of a new, multi-perspectival narrative, where traumatic (historical) memory is given space to flow " multidirectionally, " (to use Michael Rothberg's term), and converge with other historical traumata.
Cet exposé étudie le photo-texte Austerlitz, écrit par W. G. Sebald, et examine de quelle manière l'insertion des photographes dans le roman, ainsi que leur interaction avec le texte, interrompent et déstabilisent la narration, en permettant d'interprétations diverses. La qualité et le thème des images inclus dans le roman, ainsi que l'ambiguïté ou l'ambivalence souvent créée par les références textuelles, mènent le lecteur à adopter la position d'un témoin et à participer au processus d'élaboration du sens textuel. Ainsi, la combinaison d'éléments visuels et textuels conduit à la restauration du témoignage et à la création d'une nouvelle narration multi-perspective où la mémoire traumatique se conduit vers des directions multiples et converge avec d'autres expériences traumatiques collectives.
The need to respond to the trauma of September 11 and the wide range of voices attempting to chro... more The need to respond to the trauma of September 11 and the wide range of voices attempting to chronicle, address, and potentially represent the event, as well as the shock and loss suffered in its aftermath, brought to the fore, once again, the difficulties in the narrativization of collective trauma. The writers’ task to provide meaning, in tandem with the necessity to bear witness to the extreme violence of the “singular event”, lay alongside the inability to express the inexpressible. How can traumatic memories resurface and how can they be articulated at a time when language appears fragmented, vision is distorted and meaning seems obliterated? The persistent uncertainty ensuing from the writers’ lament over the obliteration of meaning, and the apparent ineffectiveness of words to express and to name, was met with diverse literary responses which varied from experimentation with formal innovations and hybrid forms to the production of alternative versions of more conservative narratives. In effect, however, literary and artistic endeavors to represent the trauma of 9/11 were invariably permeated by the haunting question of the resurgence, restoration and preservation of memory. Irrespective of the emerging methodological dilemma surrounding the fictional representation of the traumatic event, attention revolved around seeking a mode of addressing the event so that traumatic memory, “inflexible and invariable, a solitary act” – as was described by van der Kolk and van der Hart in the Intrusive Past – becomes “narrative memory”, a social act that can be shared.
This article wishes to contend that the resurgence of traumatic memory and its reinstatement as a socially shared practice reside in the exploration of memory’s multidirectional dynamic which debates assertions of uniqueness and focuses on the analogies and similarities between diverse historical traumata. “Multidirectional Memory” constitutes a productive, intercultural model which, as conceived by Michael Rothberg, “posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites.” (Multidirectional Memory, 11) Literature provides a privileged topos for the potentiality of multidirectional memory to surface, I suggest, specifically with/in photo-textuality, the employment, in other words, of the photograph and its insertion in the verbal narrative in a relationship of “interreference” and complementarity with the written text. While discussing Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as an example, a novel that explores the traumatic experience of 9/11 in juxtaposition to the traumatic experience of WWII, the article demonstrates how the photographic stills embedded in the verbal narrative create ruptures that incite the involvement of the respondent viewer/reader in the production of meaning. Seminal to this process is the ordinary, banal even, subject matter of the photographs, inviting what Marianne Hirsch calls “affiliative looking”, which carries the potentiality of disassociation from the traumatic event, and, enhanced by the aporias raised by the interaction of the two elements, allows for an affective mode of addressing the singular traumatic event to be developed; thus, historic calamity may be approached by analogy to other catastrophic events, regardless of temporal or geographical occurrence.
This paper springs from the issues raised with reference to the historiographical representation ... more This paper springs from the issues raised with reference to the historiographical representation of limit events and the challenges presented in the attempt to address collective trauma, and wishes to contend that fictional works of photo-textuality —in other words novels which consist of verbal as well as visual (photographic) components— carry the potential to place such 'unrepresentable' or 'indescribable' events among the historically narratable. While focusing predominantly on word-image interactions, this paper reads W. G. Sebald's photo-text The Emigrants (1992) as an example of photo-literary narratives of trauma, to examine the ways in which these bimedial structures enable the surfacing of memory in multidirectionality. This is achieved, I argue, via the employment of the valuable functions of testimony and witnessing, the establishment of polyphony and multi-perspectivity—consequent, predominantly, to the reciprocal relationship between verbal and visual narrative— and the ensuing involvement of the respondent viewer/reader in the production of meaning. Within this context, the insertion of the photograph in the verbal narrative, and the aporias raised by the interaction of the two components, allows for an affective mode for addressing the singular traumatic event to be developed, and for historic calamity to be approached in a manner that echoes the experiences of other victims and/or survivors of catastrophic events. Thus, the traumatic past may be reconstructed by analogy and, while singular, also meet Paul Ricoeur's definition of the historical as contributing " to the development of a plot. " Introduction: Limit events and the challenges of representation
Editorial Activity by Angeliki Tseti
American Studies After Postmodernism, 2024
This book explores the major challenges that the long-standing and
diversely debated demise of... more This book explores the major challenges that the long-standing and
diversely debated demise of postmodernism signifies for American literature, art,
culture, history, and politics, in the present, third decade of the twenty-first century.
Its scope comprises a vigorous discussion of all these diverse fields undertaken by
distinguished scholars as well as junior researchers, U.S. Americanists and European
Americanists alike. Focusing on socio-political and cultural developments in the
contemporary U.S., their contributions highlight the interconnectedness of the
geopolitical, economic, environmental and technological crises that define the
historical present on global scale. Organized in three parts, the volume begins with an
interdisciplinary investigation of the present moment as a time of upheaval and shift.
Interest in the second part revolves around the ongoing relevance of postmodernism to
the contemporary condition; while, the essays in the final part question the most
promising, emerging trends of the critical debate that defines the moment after
postmodernism.
(Theodora Tsimpouki, Konstantinos Blatanis, Angeliki Tseti, editors)
Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, 2018
Routledge Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory, 2018
From the Editor:
The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism examines the extent to... more From the Editor:
The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism examines the extent to which poetry intertwines with painting and the visual at large, and studies the singular relationship established between language and image, observesing the modalities and workings of what is termed ‘intermedial transposition‘. By following a critical method of the close analysis of texts, the book examines to what extent the "pictorial" tool may be of help to analyze literary texts and thus enlarge and enrich literary criticism.
Conference Presentations by Angeliki Tseti
ESSE 2024 conference, Seminar 43, Word and Image in Process: Adaptation, Repurposing and Re/Transmediation. , 2024
“Myth and Art Revisited” Conference. English Department, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 2019
“Readings of the Visual: Holocaust Photography and Education in the Digital Era,” European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), 2018
The Politics of Space and the Humanities, Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS), Thessaloniki, Greece, 2017
"Beyond the Ruin: Investigating the Fragment in English Studies", Hellenic Association for the Study of English (HASE), Athens, Greece. , 2017
EAAS 2016 conference, Constanta, Romania.
“Don DeLillo: ‘Fiction Rescues History’”, Paris, France., 2016
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Papers by Angeliki Tseti
The works chosen for this exploration, a film and a photo-textual memoir respectively, employ visuality and the fragments of witnesses’ or bystanders’ memories as the cardinal aspects of their endeavour to narrate the catastrophe and destruction of European Jews during WWII. Both auteurs (re)turn to the sites of torture and seek to reconstruct the past in and through the present, by highlighting, precisely, the erasure of traces.
Grandma’s Tattoos sheds light specifically to the plight of female victims, a distinction which tends to be overseen in scholarly explorations of trauma under the pretext that an act of such excess places the human over gender-oriented narratives. Still, the violation of the female body, and its targeting in the process of the physical destruction of a racial or ethnic group, is a cardinal aspect of the genocidal process. The female body has consistently been employed as a systematised weapon of domination during a genocide, owing to its ability for biological reproduction—integrally connected to the disruption and eradication of the national lineage—and due to the culturally imposed notions of disempowerment of the male victims through the defiling or assimilation of the female population. Furthermore, gender emerges as a determining factor with reference to the traumatised subjects’ working through the experience, specifically in relation to the scarcity of narrations and (non)-dissemination of the traumatic experience. More specifically, as will be discussed, the refusal to narrate and the necessity to secrecy in the cases of female victims of genocide indicates a type of survivor’s guilt that resides not in the act of escaping death per se, but, more literally, in being caught in between the need for survival, and the social stigma consequent to these women’s rescue and attempt at re-integrating into the Armenian society and re-rooting themselves; their becoming, as per human rights activist Odette Bazil, “a subject of shame [and] degradation…a ‘pariah’” (Interview WNN n.p.).
While addressing these matters, Grandma’s Tattoos significantly unfolds around the inherent paradox residing in the female body as the means to exterminate race, but also the source of continuation of life and the medium for the preservation of memory, specifically through the creation of the family, and the special bonds established between the survivors and their offspring, through the workings of “postmemory.” Within the context of familial ties and postmnemonic dynamics, but also in the context of (historical) collective trauma, the bodily mark—in this case the tattoos—emerges as the prevalent visual figuration of the traumatic experience. The marking of the body reflects the incommunicability of the experience—and, by transference, the often unbridgeable gap between survivors and their descendants—since, as Hirsch observes, the image of ruptured skin that “objectifies the victims identifying them as slaves or (concentration camps) prisoners” simultaneously represents an experience that is “ultimately and utterly personal” (The Generation of Postmemory 80). These bodily marks do not only significantly alter the woman’s physical identity, but also exercise a strong impact on the relationship between mothers and daughters, by breaching the process of identification effectuated through bodily resemblance between them and by signifying a radically different history that eventually separates them.
The narrativisation of these women’s experience and the attempt to sustain remembrance through the cinematic mode is consonant to the widely discussed relation of the visual to trauma while also standing in accord with the director’s notion that “documentary film can give access to an experience that cannot be recalled, but that, at the same time, cannot be forgotten” (“Taboos, Tattoos, and Trauma” n.p.). While sequencing and translating the frozen images of the photographs into a series of scenes, and by welding the archival images, family photographs and survivors’ testimonies through filmic representation Khardalian compensates for the fragmentation and occasional lack of cohesion that is characteristic of survivors’ recollections, and “salvage[s] the long-forgotten details from oblivion” (Grandma’s 32:32); the documentary film places these narrations into context, so that the sum of the accounts becomes an integrated whole that may claim its place among the culturally sanctioned narratives of the genocide. Further still, I argue, the narration of the family story through film is tantamount to a gesture towards moving from postmemory to a transcultural, multidirectional or connective type of memory. Thus, by exploring the potential of the visual to establish affiliative connections, the filmic rendition of these women’s plight, while never shedding its specificity and singularity, bears a potential to affectively activate the power of memory to relate, connect and achieve an affective impact that may allow for the transference of these memories to be performed not only through generations, but also through cultures.
Cet exposé étudie le photo-texte Austerlitz, écrit par W. G. Sebald, et examine de quelle manière l'insertion des photographes dans le roman, ainsi que leur interaction avec le texte, interrompent et déstabilisent la narration, en permettant d'interprétations diverses. La qualité et le thème des images inclus dans le roman, ainsi que l'ambiguïté ou l'ambivalence souvent créée par les références textuelles, mènent le lecteur à adopter la position d'un témoin et à participer au processus d'élaboration du sens textuel. Ainsi, la combinaison d'éléments visuels et textuels conduit à la restauration du témoignage et à la création d'une nouvelle narration multi-perspective où la mémoire traumatique se conduit vers des directions multiples et converge avec d'autres expériences traumatiques collectives.
This article wishes to contend that the resurgence of traumatic memory and its reinstatement as a socially shared practice reside in the exploration of memory’s multidirectional dynamic which debates assertions of uniqueness and focuses on the analogies and similarities between diverse historical traumata. “Multidirectional Memory” constitutes a productive, intercultural model which, as conceived by Michael Rothberg, “posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites.” (Multidirectional Memory, 11) Literature provides a privileged topos for the potentiality of multidirectional memory to surface, I suggest, specifically with/in photo-textuality, the employment, in other words, of the photograph and its insertion in the verbal narrative in a relationship of “interreference” and complementarity with the written text. While discussing Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as an example, a novel that explores the traumatic experience of 9/11 in juxtaposition to the traumatic experience of WWII, the article demonstrates how the photographic stills embedded in the verbal narrative create ruptures that incite the involvement of the respondent viewer/reader in the production of meaning. Seminal to this process is the ordinary, banal even, subject matter of the photographs, inviting what Marianne Hirsch calls “affiliative looking”, which carries the potentiality of disassociation from the traumatic event, and, enhanced by the aporias raised by the interaction of the two elements, allows for an affective mode of addressing the singular traumatic event to be developed; thus, historic calamity may be approached by analogy to other catastrophic events, regardless of temporal or geographical occurrence.
Editorial Activity by Angeliki Tseti
diversely debated demise of postmodernism signifies for American literature, art,
culture, history, and politics, in the present, third decade of the twenty-first century.
Its scope comprises a vigorous discussion of all these diverse fields undertaken by
distinguished scholars as well as junior researchers, U.S. Americanists and European
Americanists alike. Focusing on socio-political and cultural developments in the
contemporary U.S., their contributions highlight the interconnectedness of the
geopolitical, economic, environmental and technological crises that define the
historical present on global scale. Organized in three parts, the volume begins with an
interdisciplinary investigation of the present moment as a time of upheaval and shift.
Interest in the second part revolves around the ongoing relevance of postmodernism to
the contemporary condition; while, the essays in the final part question the most
promising, emerging trends of the critical debate that defines the moment after
postmodernism.
(Theodora Tsimpouki, Konstantinos Blatanis, Angeliki Tseti, editors)
The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism examines the extent to which poetry intertwines with painting and the visual at large, and studies the singular relationship established between language and image, observesing the modalities and workings of what is termed ‘intermedial transposition‘. By following a critical method of the close analysis of texts, the book examines to what extent the "pictorial" tool may be of help to analyze literary texts and thus enlarge and enrich literary criticism.
Conference Presentations by Angeliki Tseti
The works chosen for this exploration, a film and a photo-textual memoir respectively, employ visuality and the fragments of witnesses’ or bystanders’ memories as the cardinal aspects of their endeavour to narrate the catastrophe and destruction of European Jews during WWII. Both auteurs (re)turn to the sites of torture and seek to reconstruct the past in and through the present, by highlighting, precisely, the erasure of traces.
Grandma’s Tattoos sheds light specifically to the plight of female victims, a distinction which tends to be overseen in scholarly explorations of trauma under the pretext that an act of such excess places the human over gender-oriented narratives. Still, the violation of the female body, and its targeting in the process of the physical destruction of a racial or ethnic group, is a cardinal aspect of the genocidal process. The female body has consistently been employed as a systematised weapon of domination during a genocide, owing to its ability for biological reproduction—integrally connected to the disruption and eradication of the national lineage—and due to the culturally imposed notions of disempowerment of the male victims through the defiling or assimilation of the female population. Furthermore, gender emerges as a determining factor with reference to the traumatised subjects’ working through the experience, specifically in relation to the scarcity of narrations and (non)-dissemination of the traumatic experience. More specifically, as will be discussed, the refusal to narrate and the necessity to secrecy in the cases of female victims of genocide indicates a type of survivor’s guilt that resides not in the act of escaping death per se, but, more literally, in being caught in between the need for survival, and the social stigma consequent to these women’s rescue and attempt at re-integrating into the Armenian society and re-rooting themselves; their becoming, as per human rights activist Odette Bazil, “a subject of shame [and] degradation…a ‘pariah’” (Interview WNN n.p.).
While addressing these matters, Grandma’s Tattoos significantly unfolds around the inherent paradox residing in the female body as the means to exterminate race, but also the source of continuation of life and the medium for the preservation of memory, specifically through the creation of the family, and the special bonds established between the survivors and their offspring, through the workings of “postmemory.” Within the context of familial ties and postmnemonic dynamics, but also in the context of (historical) collective trauma, the bodily mark—in this case the tattoos—emerges as the prevalent visual figuration of the traumatic experience. The marking of the body reflects the incommunicability of the experience—and, by transference, the often unbridgeable gap between survivors and their descendants—since, as Hirsch observes, the image of ruptured skin that “objectifies the victims identifying them as slaves or (concentration camps) prisoners” simultaneously represents an experience that is “ultimately and utterly personal” (The Generation of Postmemory 80). These bodily marks do not only significantly alter the woman’s physical identity, but also exercise a strong impact on the relationship between mothers and daughters, by breaching the process of identification effectuated through bodily resemblance between them and by signifying a radically different history that eventually separates them.
The narrativisation of these women’s experience and the attempt to sustain remembrance through the cinematic mode is consonant to the widely discussed relation of the visual to trauma while also standing in accord with the director’s notion that “documentary film can give access to an experience that cannot be recalled, but that, at the same time, cannot be forgotten” (“Taboos, Tattoos, and Trauma” n.p.). While sequencing and translating the frozen images of the photographs into a series of scenes, and by welding the archival images, family photographs and survivors’ testimonies through filmic representation Khardalian compensates for the fragmentation and occasional lack of cohesion that is characteristic of survivors’ recollections, and “salvage[s] the long-forgotten details from oblivion” (Grandma’s 32:32); the documentary film places these narrations into context, so that the sum of the accounts becomes an integrated whole that may claim its place among the culturally sanctioned narratives of the genocide. Further still, I argue, the narration of the family story through film is tantamount to a gesture towards moving from postmemory to a transcultural, multidirectional or connective type of memory. Thus, by exploring the potential of the visual to establish affiliative connections, the filmic rendition of these women’s plight, while never shedding its specificity and singularity, bears a potential to affectively activate the power of memory to relate, connect and achieve an affective impact that may allow for the transference of these memories to be performed not only through generations, but also through cultures.
Cet exposé étudie le photo-texte Austerlitz, écrit par W. G. Sebald, et examine de quelle manière l'insertion des photographes dans le roman, ainsi que leur interaction avec le texte, interrompent et déstabilisent la narration, en permettant d'interprétations diverses. La qualité et le thème des images inclus dans le roman, ainsi que l'ambiguïté ou l'ambivalence souvent créée par les références textuelles, mènent le lecteur à adopter la position d'un témoin et à participer au processus d'élaboration du sens textuel. Ainsi, la combinaison d'éléments visuels et textuels conduit à la restauration du témoignage et à la création d'une nouvelle narration multi-perspective où la mémoire traumatique se conduit vers des directions multiples et converge avec d'autres expériences traumatiques collectives.
This article wishes to contend that the resurgence of traumatic memory and its reinstatement as a socially shared practice reside in the exploration of memory’s multidirectional dynamic which debates assertions of uniqueness and focuses on the analogies and similarities between diverse historical traumata. “Multidirectional Memory” constitutes a productive, intercultural model which, as conceived by Michael Rothberg, “posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites.” (Multidirectional Memory, 11) Literature provides a privileged topos for the potentiality of multidirectional memory to surface, I suggest, specifically with/in photo-textuality, the employment, in other words, of the photograph and its insertion in the verbal narrative in a relationship of “interreference” and complementarity with the written text. While discussing Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as an example, a novel that explores the traumatic experience of 9/11 in juxtaposition to the traumatic experience of WWII, the article demonstrates how the photographic stills embedded in the verbal narrative create ruptures that incite the involvement of the respondent viewer/reader in the production of meaning. Seminal to this process is the ordinary, banal even, subject matter of the photographs, inviting what Marianne Hirsch calls “affiliative looking”, which carries the potentiality of disassociation from the traumatic event, and, enhanced by the aporias raised by the interaction of the two elements, allows for an affective mode of addressing the singular traumatic event to be developed; thus, historic calamity may be approached by analogy to other catastrophic events, regardless of temporal or geographical occurrence.
diversely debated demise of postmodernism signifies for American literature, art,
culture, history, and politics, in the present, third decade of the twenty-first century.
Its scope comprises a vigorous discussion of all these diverse fields undertaken by
distinguished scholars as well as junior researchers, U.S. Americanists and European
Americanists alike. Focusing on socio-political and cultural developments in the
contemporary U.S., their contributions highlight the interconnectedness of the
geopolitical, economic, environmental and technological crises that define the
historical present on global scale. Organized in three parts, the volume begins with an
interdisciplinary investigation of the present moment as a time of upheaval and shift.
Interest in the second part revolves around the ongoing relevance of postmodernism to
the contemporary condition; while, the essays in the final part question the most
promising, emerging trends of the critical debate that defines the moment after
postmodernism.
(Theodora Tsimpouki, Konstantinos Blatanis, Angeliki Tseti, editors)
The Pictorial Third: An Essay into Intermedial Criticism examines the extent to which poetry intertwines with painting and the visual at large, and studies the singular relationship established between language and image, observesing the modalities and workings of what is termed ‘intermedial transposition‘. By following a critical method of the close analysis of texts, the book examines to what extent the "pictorial" tool may be of help to analyze literary texts and thus enlarge and enrich literary criticism.
Μπέρρυ Ναχμίας: Κραυγή για το αύριο
Επιμέλεια - επίμετρο: Οντέτ Βαρών-Βασάρ.
Εκδ Αλεξάνδρεια, Αθήνα 2020