scholarly journals Trauma, Narrative and History: Representation of Traumatic Experience in the Works of Algirdas Landsbergis

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 309-323
Author(s):  
Gabija Bankauskaitė ◽  
Loreta Huber
Keyword(s):  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
Individual Event ◽  
Trauma Narrative ◽  
The Past ◽  
Stressful Experience ◽  
Event Based ◽  
Trauma Fiction

The twentieth century witnessed an abundant number of traumatic events related to dark history. Trauma caused by war, occupation, exile, repression, gave rise to migration or mass murder. To rely upon Cathy Caruth (1996: 3), the concept of trauma is understood as a physical wound; however, subsequently in medicine and the literature of psychiatry, especially in Freud’s works, the concept of trauma came to be understood as a psychological wound. In addition, trauma is not only a disturbing or stressful experience that affects an individual physically or psychologically, it may also be based on other factors created by society. Over time the field of trauma in various contexts expanded so that today it is widely used in sociology when analysing historical and cultural events. Cultural traumatic memory is mirrored in trauma fiction that conveys the experience of loss and suffering, there is a space for memories, introspection, recollections, flashbacks and awful remembrances that are colored by pain. Apart from individual, event-based trauma, there is another category of trauma variously called cultural or historical trauma, which affects groups of people. Numerous studies have been conducted on the latter topic, however, trauma and its expression in Lithuanian literature has not yet been sufficiently documented. The aim of this study is to discuss the concepts of cultural and historical trauma and the way trauma is reflected in Algirdas Jeronimas Landsbergis’ works. The authors of the study claim that Landsbergis – one of many Lithuanian writers-in-exile – wrote texts that fill a cultural vacuum and invite a re-discussion of what was most painful in the past.

scholarly journals Traumatic Memory in Ukrainian Literary Reception: Symptoms of Post-dependence

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-250
Author(s):  
Oksana Pukhonska
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Trauma ◽  
The Social ◽  
Second World ◽  
Literary Reception

The paper is devoted to analysis of the post-totalitarian memory in literary reception of Ukraine. After the decades of ignoring, this memory became the driving force of social processes and the construct of national identity. The author pays attention to the social trauma of soviet repressions and Second World War, which negatively influenced cultural consciousness of the society. Displaced and forgotten memory is understood as the main reason for lack of progress in the post-Soviet Ukraine. The traumatic experience of the past turned out to be both a lesson and an incentive for large-scale public and conscious transformations, about which modern authors write.

Сучасна українська література в об’єктиві студій пам’яті: жіночі виміри

2021 ◽  
pp. 113-123
Author(s):  
Oksana Pukhonska
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Research Problem ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
Important Method ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Democratic Societies

The article is dedicated to a very important topic, which belongs not only to literature but also to Ukrainian history, culture and social life. Speaking about memory, we mean the experience of the past, which very often influences the main aspects of our modernity, in particular, if we are talking about traumatic experience of the history, which was not rethought and did not become a socio-cultural discourse. In the context of the mentioned research problem, the fact that women experience cruelty, humiliation, and injustice is one of those questions, which were not solved during the last decades of developing of democratic societies. Contemporary Ukrainian literature tries to find a solution of unfair reception of the past using a very important method of rethinking traumatic memory. That is why it becomes the subject of different researches, one of which is in the suggested article.

scholarly journals Experiencing Historical Trauma: Religious Models of Sublimation

2021 ◽  
pp. 167-177
Author(s):  
S. V. Riazanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Research Question ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Teaching Principles ◽  
Life Saving ◽  
Role Of Religion

The article analyzes the approaches and methods of sublimation of cultural and social trauma among believers using the example of localized cases. The subject of research is the established mechanism of experiencing and rethinking the traumatic experience between generations of believers of different faiths. The research question is posed by determining the role of religion as a compensatory social institution that registers the negative elements of the past in a soteriological aspect. The research field includes a part of the Western Urals as a traditionally multicultural region, characterized by the traditional residence of representatives of the so-called “non-traditional” religious communities. The study involved members of the local ummah, as well as Christians included in the communities of “classical” Pentecostals and Baptists belonging to the so-called “Separated Brotherhood”. The method of collecting information was a semi-standardized interview, verified through an appeal to the memoir publications of one of the groups. The respondents included believers whose older relatives belonging to the second or third generation were subjected to repressive influences. The main attention was paid to prevailing techniques that have doctrinal foundations and contribute to a change in the emotional vector in assessing the resulting traumatic experience. The concept of injury soteriology is introduced, in which injury is perceived as a way of self-improvement and solving life-saving tasks. Three models of sublimation of a trauma of the past are identified, associated with confessional belonging and forming different strategies for working with this trauma. The influence of these models on the value system of an individual and a group and on the formation of markers for assessing events is determined. A correlation was revealed between the way of perceiving the negative past, the level of individual participation of believers in the processes of commemoration and the basic teaching principles of the community. The legitimate role of religion in relation to traumatic experience built into the pan-religious soteriological concept is established.

scholarly journals Mastering the Great Purge Trauma: Mythopoetic Strategies in Contemporary Russian Literature for the Young

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Nikkareva
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Trauma Fiction ◽  
Textual Strategy

Formerly reserved for adult, texts about traumatic events of the past have now entered the domain of children’s literature. Such texts “play the key role in the double-edged process of grieving and prevention” (A. Etkind) and are seen as essential for familiarizing Russian children and adolescents with social history. This article analyzes the ways of representing and mastering traumatic experiences of the past in contemporary literature an focuses on the period of the Great Purge in Russia, using the examples of E. Elchin’s Breaking Stalin’s Nose and Y. Yakovleva’s Raven’s Children. 1938. These narratives rely on the mythopoetic strategies of a parable as an ultimately artificial and supra-historical construction; at the same time, they utilize techniques used by literary non-fiction oriented towards ego-texts and documentary evidence. These strategies use real historical events as a trigger for associative memory in the manner characteristic of the aesthetics of post-memory. Keywords: historical trauma, fiction of the Great Purge, historical fiction for children and young adult (YA), mythopoetic textual strategy, E.Elchin, Y. Yakovleva

Postcolonial Trauma in the 21st-Century English Female Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-104
Author(s):  
Lilia F. Khabibullina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Psychological Problem ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Family Chronicle ◽  
White Teeth

The postcolonial fiction of the 21st century has developed a new version of family chronicle depicting the life of several generations of migrants to demonstrate the complexity of their experience, different for each generation. This article aims at investigating this tradition from the perspective of three urgent problems: trauma, postcolonial experience, and the “female” theme. The author uses the most illustrative modern women’s postcolonial writings (Z. Smith, Ju. Chang) to show the types of trauma featured in postcolonial literature as well as the change in the character of traumatic experience, including the migrant’s automythologization from generation to generation. There are several types of trauma, or stages experienced by migrants: historical, migration and selfidentification, more or less correlated with three generations of migrants. Historical trauma is the most severe and most often insurmountable for the first generation. It generates a myth about the past, terrible or beautiful, depending on the writer’s intention realized at the level of the writer or the characters. A most expanded form of this trauma can be found in the novel Wild Swans by Jung Chang, where the “female” experience underlines the severity of the historical situation in the homeland of migrants. The trauma of migration manifests itself as a situation of deterritorialization, lack of place, when the experience of the past dominates and prevents the migrants from adapting to a new life. This situation is clearly illustrated in the novel White Teeth by Z. Smith, where the first generation of migrants cannot cope with the effects of trauma. The trauma of selfidentification promotes a fictitious identity in the younger generation of migrants. Unable to join real life communities, they create automyths, joining fictional communities based on cultural myths (Muslim organizations, rap culture, environmental organizations). Such examples can be found in Z. Smith’s White Teeth and On Beauty. Thus, the problem of trauma undergoes erosion, because, strictly speaking, with each new generation, the event experienced as traumatic is less worth designating as such. Compared to historical trauma or the trauma of migration, trauma of self-identification is rather a psychological problem that affects the emotional sphere and is quite survivable for most of the characters.

Trauma and Recovery: Finding the Ordinary Hero in Fictional Recovery Narratives

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 460-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Gumb
Keyword(s):  
Recovery Process ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Trauma Survivors ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Trauma Narrative ◽  
Contemporary Novels ◽  
Recovery Narratives ◽  
Extreme Responses ◽  
Trauma Fiction

Our desire to speak, to tell the stories of our personal and communal suffering, offered literature myriad tales spanning continents and histories. Traumatic experience has been recorded for historical reference and has been represented in fiction as individual and collective stories. The word “trauma” is so broadly used in contemporary vernacular that it is difficult to wrangle it into a simple definition. Literary theory, informed by the fields of social psychology, neurobiology, psychology, and psychiatry, has developed contradictory theories of trauma, and contentious debates continue as theorists try to capture what has become an almost indefinable term. Links between trauma and heroism exist in trauma fiction which can be teased from existing literary canons or from contemporary novels. Traditional notions of heroism, much like the concept of trauma, are complex and weighted with a catalogue of elements that may serve to complicate an already multifarious field of study. Notions of heroism can be integrated within a new trauma narrative that reveals a new subject, the recovery process. I argue for a shift from the focus on trauma stories of wounding, or on suffering, and revenge narratives to repositioning literary trauma studies toward more life-affirming subjectivities emerging from recovery narratives. It is my view that recovery narratives consist of three associated elements: resilience, reconciliation, and resistance. I demonstrate how trauma survivors can be read as heroes in their own tales of recovery, and how the story of the hero can be infused into the trauma narrative, or teased from existing texts, to create a productive and progressive narrative rather than the destructive and degenerative approach that focusses on extreme responses to trauma. It is my position that recovery from trauma, as depicted in literary fiction, can be productively read as a tale of “ordinary” heroism.

scholarly journals VISUAL ART AS AN INSTRUMENT OF REORGANIZATION OF POST-CATASTROPHIC MEMORY

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-47
Author(s):  
O. O. Geraschenko
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
Negative Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Dynamic Movement ◽  
External Turbulence ◽  
Special Meaning

This article provides analysis of the Art approach towards transformation of longstanding traumatic experience in different countries, suggests possible consequences for the society in case if the catastrophic memory remains un-reorganized and grounds conclusion as for need to review approaches towards the later problem in Ukraine. During last three decades of statehood one can observe dynamic movement of Ukraine toward cultural assertion. One of its important elements is the comprehension of public traumatic experience. The latter bares immense importance for the success of Ukraine as a state due to the fact that for generations Ukrainians have been accumulating memory of mournful events that took place in the lives of their ancestors without the possibility to carry out the proper work of sorrow. Topicality of the mentioned problem has a special meaning nowadays considering that the state of Ukraine apt for new bouleversements. In the circumstances of internal and external turbulence conclusion of a new social contract is crucial, at the same time the negative experience of gen- erations which was not proper transformed, does not allow to address current social problems rationally and to consolidate society. Much is already said as for the role of memory in recreation of the past for the sake of the future, but the place of artistic practices in this process remains complex and uncomprehended. How do artistic practices objectivate social life and assist heeling? Visual art resonates with private or collec- tive memory allowing new means of acceptation as well as perceptional rectification and conceptualization of experience associated with sorrow. This article suggests the theoretical and methodological analysis of the “work of sorrow” through the prism of artistic expressions, character- izes their influence of re-organization of traumatic memory and demonstrates the role of visual art as an instrument to operate with reminiscence.

Recounting coup as the recirculation of Indigenous vitality: A narrative alternative to historical trauma

2021 ◽  
pp. 136346152110549
Author(s):  
Joseph P. Gone
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
American Indian ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Psychological Trauma ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Trauma Narrative ◽  
War Narratives ◽  
Tribal Communities ◽  
The Impact

Contemporary American Indians suffer from disproportionately high degrees of psychiatric distress. Mental health researchers and professionals, as well as American Indian community members, have consistently associated these disproportionate rates of distress with Indigenous historical experiences of European and Euro-American colonization. This emphasis on the impact of colonization and associated historical consciousness within tribal communities has occasioned increasingly widespread professional consideration of historical trauma among Indigenous peoples. In contrast to personal experiences of a traumatic nature, the discourse of Indigenous historical trauma (IHT) weds the concepts of “historical oppression” and “psychological trauma” to explain community-wide risk for adverse mental health outcomes originating from the depredations of past colonial subjugation through intergenerational transmission of vulnerability and risk. Long before the emergence of accounts of IHT, however, many American Indian communities prized a markedly different form of narrative: the coup tale. By way of illustration, I explore various historical functions of this speech genre by focusing on Aaniiih-Gros Ventre war narratives, including their role in conveying vitality or life. By virtue of their recognition and celebration of agency, mastery, and vitality, Aaniiih war stories functioned as the discursive antithesis of IHT. Through comparative consideration of the coup tale and the trauma narrative, I propose an alternative framework for cultivating Indigenous community “survivance” rather than vulnerability based on these divergent discursive practices.

Re-membering Syria’s Traumatic Past: Gender, Poetics, and Loss in Manhal al-Sarrāj’s As a River Should

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Linda Istanbulli
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Traumatic Memory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Abstract In a system where the state maintains a monopoly over historical interpretation, aesthetic investigations of denied traumatic memory become a space where the past is confronted, articulated, and deemed usable both for understanding the present and imagining the future. This article focuses on Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a river should) by Manhal al-Sarrāj, one of the first Syrian novels to openly break the silence on the “1982 Hama massacre.” Engaging the politics and poetics of trauma remembrance, al-Sarrāj places the traumatic history of the city of Hama within a longer tradition of loss and nostalgia, most notably the poetic genre of rithāʾ (elegy) and the subgenre of rithāʾ al-mudun (city elegy). In doing so, Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr functions as a literary counter-site to official histories of the events of 1982, where threatened memory can be preserved. By investigating the intricate relationship between armed conflict and gender, the novel mourns Hama’s loss while condemning the violence that engendered it. The novel also makes new historical interpretations possible by reproducing the intricate relationship between mourning, violence, and gender, dislocating the binary lines around which official narratives of armed conflicts are typically constructed.

scholarly journals Rewriting the Past: Gerard Mannix Flynn’s Nothing to Say and James X

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-121
Author(s):  
Victoria Connor
Keyword(s):  
Traumatic Events ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Trauma Survivor ◽  
Trauma Fiction

If, as Anne Whitehead suggests, the term ‘trauma fiction’ represents a paradox, that violence resists containment through language, then writers who engage and attempt to represent traumatic events in their work can never fully render the horror of trauma through their writing. Yet artists such as Gerard Mannix Flynn, a survivor of trauma himself, still attempt to translate the experience of trauma into language. In the novel Nothing to Say and the play James X, Flynn explores the ways in which trauma is both experienced and recalled and the cathartic effects that ‘containing’ trauma through language can have. The impetus to write, to express the trauma one has suffered through language, offers the victim agency over his or her own narrative. The agency that the trauma survivor gains is not literal; rather, they have finally gained control over what Cathy Caruth identifies as the ‘haunting power’ of repressed trauma, and in doing so are able to take the first steps towards recovery. In both works, Flynn attempts to traverse the paradox that Whitehead presents: he attempts to represent that which is deemed unrepresentable, and put the violence inflicted upon the protagonists into words.

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