Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form

Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal, 2021

There has been a particular interest in trauma studies since the end of the twentieth century; not just in psychology and psychiatry, the main fields of study concerning mental disorders, but in every aspect of life. Consequently, a growing number of publications have been published that approach trauma from various fields: social and literary studies, comparative literature, philosophy, ethics, etc. At the same time, from talk shows to the news broadcasts, from popular media (post-apocalyptic movies, disaster films, games to art movies), from direct testimonies of survivors to fictive accounts of traumatic experience, there is a proliferation of all kinds of representations of trauma to the extent that testimony has been suggested as “the literary mode […] of our times”, whereas “our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony” (Felman 1995: 17). The question naturally arises whether trauma has become a cliché in contemporary literature and culture, or whether literature h...

Heidelberg: C. Winter., 2011

Trauma and ethics are two terms inextricably linked. This book is concerned with trauma and its representations in contemporary British and American literature within the wider context of the ethics of writing, reading, and interpreting trauma and trauma narratives. More particularly, it analyses the connections between trauma, gender, identity, and genre issues. The contributors to this volume study the various modes of writing, genres, and generic conventions which have been used and/or subverted to represent traumas of different kinds in a selection of contemporary British and American novels. This collection will consequently deal with one of the most important concerns of contemporary academic criticism, namely, the ethical implications of the representation of trauma. Moreover, gender issues will also be given special attention, since many contemporary novels in English focus on the articulation of traumas resulting from the inequalities and abuses connected with identity and gender.

2020

Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History and Kali Tal's Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma sparked a great attention to literature lovers.

Literary trauma studies is a rapidly developing field which examines how literature deals with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such historical and current phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides, 9/11, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments. It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma. Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to fur...

Trauma involves a rupture in the temporal and symbolic orders at individual and collective levels. Fictional representation of trauma, therefore, is marked by a problem of referentiality, where mimesis fails and chronology breaks down. The article opens with a discussion on the disorientation in the co-ordinative links between the world, the self, and representational tools in the event of a traumatic experience, which results in the crisis of referentiality. The inadequacy of language as a representational medium on the one hand, and unacknowledgement of extreme events beyond " socially validated reality " on the other, constitute two of the major issues creative artists have to deal with. An extreme event leaves a mnemonic gap in the psyche of the traumatized individual, and the process of recovery involves the gap being filled in with narrative memory, suggesting an epistemological void. Narrative memory acts as the surrogate memory of the traumatic event, which is unavailable to willed recollection. This surrogate memory is compared to Jean Baudrillard's third order of simulation, where a false presence conceals the absence of any basic reality. Recognizing the referential and representational crises at work in rendering traumatic experiences in fiction, the article goes on to explore the ways of bypassing them and discuss the idea of indirect representation in Michael Rothberg's Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Rothberg believes that an oblique rendition of traumatic events in fiction may be an appropriate representational mode within the conflicting demands of the documentation of reality, meditation on the formal limits by the creative artist, and risky circulation of images in the globalized world. This leads to a deliberation on Anne Whitehead and Laurie Vickroy's idea of the emerging genre of " trauma fiction " with its thematic and stylistic concerns. The article ends with a summary of the representational techniques likely to feature in fictions written on violent events.

On May 26 th 1997, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) tabled one of the most shocking and painful reports that Australia had ever seen. The Bringing Them Home report (Wilson and Dodson, 1997) was the result of months of consultations right across the continent of Australia, and established that between the years of 1910 until the late 1970's between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families. This paper argues that an ethnographic exploration of trauma (while just one modality of understanding suffering) calls for a more involved and deliberate methodological approach. Key to this is understanding the question of how to represent, write, and articulate the difficulties of lives caught in the moral web of suffering. This article concludes with a focus on the issue of writing to do justice to these very lives arguing for a commitment to our research participant's anxieties and concerns with the anthropological writing project. Résumé : Le 26 mai 1997, la Commission australienne pour les droits de l'Homme et l'égalité des chances (HREOC) a déposé l'un des rapports les plus choquants et douloureux que l'Australie ait jamais vu. Le rapport " Bringing Them Home " (Wilson et Dodson, 1997) est le résultat de mois de consultations à travers le continent austral. Il démontre qu'entre 1910 et les années 1970, entre un dixième et un tiers des enfants aborigènes ont été séparés de force de leur famille. Le présent article soutient que l'analyse ethnographique des traumatismes (une des modalités de l'analyse compréhensive de la souffrance parmi d'autres) nécessite une approche méthodologique impliquée et réflexive. Il pose la question de la représentation, de l'écriture et de l'expression des difficultés de vivre sous l'emprise de la souffrance morale. L'article se concentre en conclusion sur la question de l'écriture qui rendra justice à ces vies : il plaide pour un engagement de l'écriture anthropologique dans les angoisses et préoccupations des participants à la recherche. Mots-clés : aborigènes d'Australie, générations volées, études de terrain, traumatisme, écriture, éthique.