scholarly journals Transgenerational Trauma, Shared Vulnerability and Interconnectedness in Zina Rohan’s The Small Book

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Silvia Pellicer-Ortín
Keyword(s):  
Memory Studies ◽  
Transgenerational Trauma ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Human Vulnerability ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Post War ◽  
Traumatic Episode ◽  
Exposure To Trauma

This article aims at showing that extreme situations, such as wars, can reveal a common human vulnerability, which thus leads to a lack of sovereignty affecting all the agents implied in the traumatic episode. In Zina Rohan’s 2010 novel, The Small Book, this shared vulnerability crosses time and space boundaries by connecting coetaneous characters and their subsequent generations through inherited traumatic memories. These connections lead Rohan to blur the boundaries between what we may understand as victims and perpetrators of trauma. Thus, drawing on significant theories within the fields of trauma and memory studies as well as on conceptions about human vulnerability and interconnectedness, the main aim of this study is to analyse the key narrative mechanisms used by this British–Jewish author in order to represent the shared vulnerability and exposure to trauma that reigns during war and post-war times.

scholarly journals “Making Nonsense of the Little Categories”: Slaughterhouse-Five and The Memoirs of a Survivor as autobiographical science fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Georgia Hight
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Living Room ◽  
World War ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

<p>Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) are both novels that blend autobiography with science fiction. In a review of Vonnegut’s Mother Night, Lessing writes that he “makes nonsense of the little categories”. The same applies to Lessing. These two novels live in the porous borders between genre—between fiction and non-fiction.  Vonnegut writes that he can’t remember much of his experiences in the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War. The war novel he writes about them has a protagonist who is “unstuck in time”. I frame my discussion of Slaughterhouse around problems of temporal and narrative ordering. Through use of fractured time, repetitions, and the chronotope, Vonnegut finds a way to express his missing and traumatic memories of the war.  Lessing’s memories are of her early childhood in Persia and Southern Rhodesia. These memories are warped, claustrophobic, and difficult to articulate. Like Slaughterhouse, Memoirs fractures time and space. I organise my discussion of Lessing’s novel around the latter, focusing on a literalised porous border: her dissolving living room wall. Borders and portals between spaces in Memoirs blend the dystopian, science-fiction world of the city with the world of Lessing’s memories; dreams with reality; and the static with the dynamic.  I pose several answers to the question of why science fiction and autobiography. A shared occupation of the two authors was a concern for the madness and dissolution of society, and science fiction engages in a tradition of expressing these concerns. Additionally, Vonnegut and Lessing use the tools of a genre in which it is acceptable for time and space to be warped or fractured. These tools not only allow for the expression of memories that are fragmented, difficult, and half forgotten, but produce worlds that mirror the form of these personal memories.</p>

The South Side of Heaven

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Younes Saramifar
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Visual Anthropology ◽  
South Side ◽  
The Past ◽  
Religious Worldview ◽  
Ontological Approach ◽  
War Memories ◽  
Post War

I portray mnemonic practices of Iranians who engaged with the past and keep the memories of martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) alive within frames and words. Through pictures taken during the annual commemoration of martyrs in southern Iran, I show how religiosity, politics and generational guilt are entangled in post-war Iran. I move against the grains of memory studies and visual anthropology by maintaining the silences and what is left unsaid instead of rendering war memories, acts of remembering and ways of seeing epistemologically coherent. I argue remembering is a practice locally shaped according to the politics of everyday life and not by imagined presupposition of memory scholars. Therefore, I draw an ontological approach towards memories in Iran by ways of seeing and religious worldview of those implicated in the Iranian memory machine.

Fashion

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Breward
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Jet Lag ◽  
Time Zone ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Consumer Expectations ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Post War

In 1947, the Parisian couturier Christian Dior launched his celebrated New Look, a collection that offered an aspirational alternative to the fabric restrictions and low consumer expectations of post-war austerity – seemingly re-routing fashionable trends in Europe and North America in the space of a season. The diarist had unwittingly become first a witness to, and then a participant in, the mysterious process of fashion change. Suffering from a version of sartorial jet-lag, she faced an oncoming tide of novelties, fresh versions of the fashion designer's diktat, while her own wardrobe remained in another, less contemporary, time zone. She knew that she must adapt or be overtaken. Though it would be difficult to re-enact this precise scenario today or in the more distant past, it does present some generic issues concerning fashion's close relationship with novelty, change, competition, guilt, and desire that will be familiar to historians of consumption in the early modern period and the contemporary. Fashion's relation to time and space has formed a fascinating context in which to consider the development of consumerism.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-202
Author(s):  
Imogen Peck
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
First Century ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Civil War Memory ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Post War

This conclusion offers an account of the main similarities between the experiences of early modern England and those of modern post-civil war states. It argues that many of the challenges that the republican governments faced have continued to confront states into the twenty-first century, and that, though the shape of a particular post-war settlement is historically contingent, the central issues with which its instigators must wrestle are not as temporally or geographically specific as we might expect. Further, it suggests that this is also true of many of the responses, from the use of amnesties and pardons to martyr narratives and the ‘othering’ of opponents. It provides one of the first transtemporal and transnational comparisons of Civil War memory and, in so doing, attempts to initiate further conversation between scholars of civil war memory across time and space.

scholarly journals Representations of Shylock in Arnold Wesker’s The Merchant, Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name and Clive Sinclair’s Shylock Must Die

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
David Brauner
Keyword(s):  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Post War ◽  
Historical Origins ◽  
Jewish Writers ◽  
Space History

Given the centrality of Shakespeare to the Western canon and, more specifically, to the idea of a national English literary tradition, and given that Shylock is one of his most (in)famous creations, it is hardly surprising that he has proved irresistible to a number of Anglo-Jewish authors. Attempts to rehabilitate Shylock and/or to reimagine his fate are not a recent phenomenon. In the post-war era, however, the task of revisiting Shakespeare’s play took on a new urgency, particularly for Jewish writers. In this essay I look at the ways in which three contemporary British Jewish authors—Arnold Wesker, Howard Jacobson and Clive Sinclair—have revisited The Merchant of Venice, focusing on the figure of Shylock as an exemplar of what Bryan Cheyette has described as “the protean instability of ‘the Jew’ as a signifier”. Wesker, Jacobson and Sinclair approach Shakespeare’s play and its most memorable character in very different ways but they share a sense that Shylock symbolically transgresses boundaries of time and space—history and geography—and is a mercurial, paradoxical figure: villain and (anti-)hero; victim and perpetrator; scapegoat and scourge. Wesker’s play is more didactic than the fiction of Jacobson and Sinclair but ultimately his Shylock eludes the historicist parameters that he attempts to impose on him, while the Shylocks of Shylock is My Name and Shylock Must Die transcend their literary-historical origins, becoming slippery, self-reflexive, protean figures who talk back to Shakespeare, while at the same time speaking to the concerns of contemporary culture.

scholarly journals Conversations about Mother: Mnemonic Strategies for Narrating Survival in (Post-) War Germany

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich
Keyword(s):  
Family Member ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Strong Correlations ◽  
Transgenerational Trauma ◽  
Political Values ◽  
Mnemonic Devices ◽  
Family Narratives ◽  
Decent Life ◽  
Narrative Agency ◽  
Post War

This article explores the strong correlations between mnemonic strategies and mnemonic triggers within family narratives. Families form narrative collectives with their own codes of narrative evocation. One sentence, even only one word, might open up a bundle of memories shared by all immediate kin. Such sharing can, however, be practised and interpreted  differently by each family member; stories are also utilised strategically to bond with one family member and sideline another. Given the specific German context of this analysis, its stories and mnemonic devices demonstrate strategies of collective and individual dissociation and victimisation. They also lead us to better understand how very normal, average Germans might have tried to live a decent life with Christian and left-leaning political values, while having no techniques, post 1945, for articulating or reflecting on either trauma or National Socialism and their lasting impact on their nation. As with most other families, the war and post-war period was dominated by memories of struggle and collective grief. Survival narratives use emplotments that can be traced through generations of grandparents, parents, and grandchildren. Exploring such transgenerational conversations enables us to widen the perspective from transgenerational trauma towards a framework of compassion and narrative agency.

scholarly journals Gendering Cultural Memory: Balzac’s Adieu

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-249
Author(s):  
Kristina Fjelkestam
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Honore De Balzac ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
History Writing ◽  
French Army ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Sex Slave ◽  
Gender Aspects ◽  
Revolutionary History

In this essay I examine the en-gendering of cultural memory in Honoré de Balzac´s story Adieu (1830), which proceeds from a repressed trauma originating in historical events. Balzac wrote the story in the spring of 1830, i. e. at a time when the French discontent with the Restoration regime was soon to explode in the July Revolution. The story is considered to claim that the Restoration regime’s repression of revolutionary history will recieve serious consequences in the present. But the question is how the now of the Restoration can best be linked to the then of the Revolution and the Empire? How can history be represented in a productive way, without silencing traumatic memories? My suggestion is that the abyss be-tween now and then has to be met with an ethically informed respect for difference. Stéphanie, the protagonist, dies when Philippe creates an exact replica of the traumatic situation in which they were separated many years ago. She then became a sex slave to the retiring French army, dehumanized during the hard Russian campaign, an experience that also dehumanized her. This Philippe refuses to acknowledge, since he wants to retrieve the woman he knew. That can of course never happen, but in insisting on it, I would claim that he actually renders Stéphanies life after the trauma impossible. Instead of emphasizing the distinction between past and present, Philippe overlooks it, with the severe consequence of Sté-phanie’s death. In my analysis I relate to pertinent discussions in the interdisciplinary field of cultural memory studies (an expanding field of research within the wider frame of cultural studies), but since it rarely discusses gender aspects I find it essential to relate also to feminist scholars who continually have scrutinized issues concerning memory and history writing.

CHINGHIZ AITMATOV’S “AND THE DAY LASTS LONGER THAN A CENTURY” IN MEMORY STUDIES

2020 ◽  
pp. 122-129
Author(s):  
Aleksandr P. Logunov ◽  
◽  
Vasilii L. Dmitriev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Intermediate State ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Soviet State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
Post War

The article considers the war memorialization in the USSR of the post-war years in the context of Ch. Aitmatov’s novel “And The Day Lasts Longer Than A Century”. Authors’ attention is paid primarily to the symbolism of the novel. The symbolism is both in its text and in the novel’s title itself. It is the symbolism that allows the authors to consider the novel not only as fiction but also as a historiosophic text. The article describes the main quality of the war memorialization in 1945–1980. It is a competition of different generations’ historic memories – the memory of the generation that survived the war and the memory of the generation that was born much later. In that regard the authors define two value orientations outlining the framework for such a memorialization. The article analyzes reasons for the legitimation of the present through the past. It also raises the question of an “intermediate state”, of external and internal factors that determine it, and an issue of the memory’s existence in the transition from one state to another. Besides, the article analyzes the historic policy of the Soviet state and its influence on the memory of the Great Patriotic War. It includes the methods for creating images of the war and their translation to different generations.

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