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

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 Changes within the editorial staff of the International Review of Social History

2007 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-371
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Editorial Staff ◽  
International Review ◽  
Editorial Committee ◽  
Executive Editor ◽  
The Past ◽  
Leading Journals

After fulfilling the position since 1987, Marcel van der Linden stepped down as executive editor of the International Review of Social History in July 2007. Over the past two decades the Review has developed into one of the leading journals in the field of international, and increasingly global, social history. For anyone who has kept track of the journal in this period, the contribution Marcel van der Linden has made to the journal's development will be clear. He remains involved with the Review in a different role. From February 2008 onward, he will be the permanent Chair of the journal's Editorial Committee, and as such will continue to be engaged in the development of the journal.

Madhouse

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-363
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tilley ◽  
Paul Christian ◽  
Susan Ledger ◽  
Jan Walmsley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Learning Disability ◽  
Social History ◽  
Learning Difficulties ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Immersive Theatre ◽  
Disability Research ◽  
History Of Institutions

Until the very end of the twentieth century the history of learning difficulties was subsumed into other histories, of psychiatry, of special education and, indeed, of disability. Initiatives to enable people with learning difficulties and their families to record their own histories and contribute to the historical record are both recent and powerful. Much of this work has been led or supported by The Open University’s Social History of Learning Disability Research (SHLD) group and its commitment to developing “inclusive history.” The article tells the story of the Madhouse Project in which actors with learning difficulties, stimulated by the story of historian activist Mabel Cooper and supported by the SHLD group, learned about and then offered their own interpretations of that history, including its present-day resonances. Through a museum exhibition they curated, and through an immersive theatre performance, the actors used the history of institutions to alert a wider public to the abuses of the past, and the continuing marginalization and exclusion of people with learning difficulties. This is an outstanding example of history’s potential to stimulate activism.

Feeling Like It Wasn't

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Or History ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.

scholarly journals Aesthetic cognition of society: modern and postmodern representations in contemporary non-fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paulo Tiago Bento
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Cognitive Engagement ◽  
Empirical Testing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Aesthetic Cognition ◽  
Operational Potential

Patterns of representation in travel writing, travel guides, journalism and memoir are shown to amount to aesthetic cognition by comparison to social science analogues. Their postmodernity questions the supposed factuality of those genres. Travel writing and travel guides’s expected orientation to the present is contested by how the past is used. The patterns show operational potential for empirical testing of usual temporal boundaries of the postmodern. Finally, they are forms of modern and postmodern cognitive engagement of tourists and would-be tourists with society, complementing major theories of tourist motivation.

scholarly journals Issues in Latin America. Sociocultural contrasts and their representations in contemporary literature

Diacronia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sorina-Crina Ghiață
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Religious Perspective ◽  
The Past ◽  
Introductory Part ◽  
Overseas Territories

Starting with the independence process of all the territories once colonies and later, overseas territories of the different states of Western Europe, Latin America meant an association of unique paradoxes. Portugal and Spain have dominated in the past, especially from a linguistic and religious perspective,the current space that became avaried cultural environment. In this context, the aim of this study is to capture, in the introductory part, characteristics of the Latin American complex identity(reflected, for example, in the names associated with this space of civilization, in political circumstances and social issues, in particular). In addition, another purpose is to highlight the way in which these aspects are considered in the prose of modern Latin American writers, Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Héctor Abad Faciolince. At the same time,emphasizing the scourge of discrimination or inequality, but especially the perpetual violence, thestudyconcludes with a reference (also found in the literary discourse of the two texts chosen for analysis, Los sordos and El olvido que seremos) to the ethical spirit, but also to the feeling of empathy—subjects approached by both writers—in a world that seems more and more fragmented and depersonalized, as if it has been occupied by a continuous stigma of imbalance.

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.

scholarly journals “Prefer not, eh?”: Re-Scribing the Lives of the Great War Poets in Contemporary British Historical Fiction

2018 ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
María Cristina Pividori
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Great War ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Past ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Post War ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Great War

Although the First World War has become history by now, the memory of the war continues to be repeatedly fictionalised: retrospectively inspired narratives are often regarded as more genuine and far-reaching than historical or documentary accounts in their rendition of the past. Yet, memory is creatively selective, reflecting a highly-conflicted process of sifting and discerning what should be remembered, neglected or amplified from the stream of war experience. In his book about Pat Barker, Mark Rawlinson argues that “historical fiction has been transformed in the post-war period by the way writers have exploited the porous and unstable demarcation between fiction and no fiction, stories and history” (14). Jill Dawson’s The Great Lover (2009), Geoff Akers’s Beating for the Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg (2006) and Robert Edric’s In Zodiac Light (2008) have not become best sellers like Barker’s Regeneration trilogy; yet, they too represent the predominant commemorative drift in contemporary British fiction about the Great War. Without doubt, these three authors have followed in Barker’s steps in their purpose of holding a mirror to real people and real events in the past and of deciphering the deleted text of ‘the war to end all wars.’ However, while Barker chose to write about the often-anthologised Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dawson, Akers and Edric base their narratives on the writings, and lives, of Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney respectively. My discussion of these three novels will explore the various ways in which the past can be accessed and interpreted from the present and represented in fiction. The authors’ decisions as to what historical instances to unravel do not just reveal the relation that contemporary British fiction entertains with the Great War and with history, but also how the past erupts in the present to interrogate it. Taking three salient features of Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” (1988)—intertextuality, parody and paratextuality—as my theoretical points of departure, I will explore the dominant frameworks and cultural conditions (that is the propagation of either patriotic or protest readings) within which the Great War has been narrated in the novels and the new approaches, opportunities and ethical implications of using historical and literary sources to re-scribe a previously non-existent version of the lives of the iconic Great War Poets.

scholarly journals Retro quality and historical consciousness in contemporary European television

2017 ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Louis Bayman
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
National History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Superior Knowledge ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Self

This article investigates the trend represented by the recent TV series This Is England 86 (2010), Deutschland 83 (2015) and 1992 (2015). It analyses retro in the series as enabling an exhilarating experience of the music, fashions and lifestyles of the past while claiming to offer a serious social history. The article thus takes issue with theories of retro that view it as ahistorical (for example Guffey), to demonstrate how retro in these series enables a particular dramatic conception of the dynamics of national history, whether in post-imperial decline (This Is England), a westalgie for the grip of geopolitical conflict (Deutschland 83) or the cyclical progression of trasformismo (1992). The article discusses the series’ common visions of the past as characterised by a pleasing youthful naivety, opposed to an implied present of cynical superior knowledge. I argue that these series embody retro’s distinct ability to combine irony and fetishism in its recreation of the past, as befits an age in which historical consciousness is increasingly referred to the intimate sphere of the individual self and its uncertain relation to posterity.

scholarly journals Rola języka w uwalnianiu się z dziedzicznych traum

Politeja ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2(65)) ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Marcol
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Village

The Role of Language in Releasing from Inherited Traumas. Negotiations of the Social Position of the Silesian Minority in Serbian Banat The aim of the paper is to show the dependence between language, collective memory (also post-memory) and sense of identity. This issue is analysed using the example of an ethnic minority living in the village of Ostojićevo (Banat, Serbia) called ‘Toutowie.’ Their ancestors came in the 19th century from Wisła (Silesian Cieszyn, Poland); they left their homes because of great hunger and were looking for jobs in Banat. Narratives about the past contain traumatic experiences of the past generations transmitted in the Silesian dialect and constituting communicative memory. At the same time, a new Polish national identity is being constructed, supported by institutions and authorities; it carries a new image of the world and creates a new cultural memory. This new identity – shaped on the basis of national categories – leads to changes of its self-identification and gives the opportunity to raise its social position in the multi-ethnic Banat community.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document