Miten analysoida sitä, mistä ei voi kertoa? – Käsikirja humanistiseen traumatutkimukseen

Colin Davis & Hanna Meretoja (eds): Routlegde Companion to Literature and Trauma. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2020, 496 pages. English summary of the review The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, edited by Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja, introduces the reader thoroughly to the history and philosophies of trauma, theory and concepts of the field, and offers a variety of analyses of literary texts from the point of view of trauma. The introduction of the handbook is thought-provoking, cohesive, and summarizes well a broad field of studies and its history. One of its strengths is including the main critiques of the field, too. The chapters of the handbook offer ways to use concepts, such as perpetrator trauma and intersectionality, in analysis and suggest ways to develop them further. A section on future directions of the field includes viewpoints on postcolonialism, critical posthumanism and new materialism. As trauma studies has been criticized for its Eurocentric bias and failure to recognise the suffering of non-Western others, perhaps some silences of marginalized people in the analysed texts or their contexts could have been brought forward even more explicitly in the handbook.

Child Writing and the Traumatised Body

Texts by young conflict survivors, including the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are worthy of historical and literary consideration on many fronts. How did young people experience, understand, and cope with damage to their bodies? What stigma did they face, and how did they make sense of their changed futures? How did they translate their experiences into prose, and how did they negotiate the meanings that such prose held within their societies? This essay suggests that juvenilia offers a deep well for other fields—trauma studies, the history of childhood, and even disability studies—to consider, and juvenilia studies might also incorporate new theoretical apparatuses that can help elucidate the personal, social, and political implications of young writers’ experiences of trauma and injury. Attention to children’s writing about their injuries may approach the asymptote of their trauma and offer insights for scholars working from numerous disciplinary points of origin. .

Multidirektionale Assemblage

Multidirectional Assemblage: Boris Khersonskii’s Family Archive Boris Khersonskii’s most acclaimed and translated volume of poetry Semeinyi arkhiv [Family Archive] (2003/2006) consists of semi-fictional miniatures narrating the sufferings of the members of a Southwest-Ukrainian Jewish Family in the short 20th century. The speaker’s laconic tone invites less of a trauma-studies approach to the Stalinist Great Terror and the Shoah than a media-sensitive update of the formalist focus on material devices and the determination of meaning from below. This contribution proposes to read Family Archive as an assemblage of imagined material media (photographs, letters, auction objects) which trace multidirectional vectors of commemoration. It proposes the notion of directionality for resolving the undecidability of referential and a-referential readings of quasi-documentary poetry.

Resilient Cyborgs

This article reads Pat Cadigan’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel Synners (1991) from the perspectives of trauma studies and posthumanism to analyze the representation of the cyborged (post)human in cyberspace. My main focus is Cadigan’s depiction of a posttraumatic world whose living conditions invite escape, and how this depiction emphasizes the fact that escape through technological transcendence is not an option, and neither is the rejection of technology altogether. Despite this bleak scenario, the novel leaves some room for optimism in the figuration of a posthuman form of resilience, inspiring reflection about future forms of engagement with technology. As this article attempts to prove, Synners uses the tropes of the cyborg and cyberspace to explore the implications of subjectivity and embodiment within technoscience. In so doing, the novel opens a critical space for interrogation of the relationship between trauma, the posthuman body, and digital technology.

Visualising Small Traumas

Portugal's vibrant comics scene originated as early as the 19th century, bringing forth brilliant individual artists, but has remained mostly unknown beyond Portugal’s borders to this day. Now a new generation employs this medium to put into question hegemonic views on the economy, politics, and society. Following the experience of the financial crisis of the past decades and its impact on social policies, access to and rules of public discourse, and civil strife, comics have questioned what constitutes a traumatogenic situation and what can act as a creative response. By looking at established graphic novels by Marco Mendes and Miguel Rocha, fanzine-level, and even experimental productions, Visualising Small Traumas is the first English-language book that addresses Portuguese contemporary comics and investigates how trauma studies can both shed a light on comics making and be informed by that very same practice.

Memory and Fiction: Trauma in Contemporary Romanian Literature

The studies of memory (memory studies) have developed a connection to the concept of trauma (trauma studies) and its manifestations. The literary field became a proper medium of evocation and testimony of past traumatic events. Therefore, social manifestations, traumatic measures of political regimes have all been integrated into literary works as a manner of attesting both their physical and psychological implications. Talking about the traumatic events of the Holocaust, James E. Young views such literary works as “documentary narrative” or, more specific, literature of testimony. Literary (and artistic) works related to the Holocaust are also object of Marianne Hirsch’s studies. In her view, evoking and narrating traumatic events implies the usage of postmemory. Past could also be evoked, as Michel Foucault considers, through literature on the basis of counter-memory. Taking into consideration different manifestations of memory in literature, the present study aims to analyse some of the Romanian contemporary works tackling on the remembrance of the traumatic ideological intervention on the female body that the prohibition of abortions represented during the communist regime. Corporal and psychological traumas that the 770 Decree caused are related in Corina Sabău’s novel And the Crickets Were Heard and also in the testimonial collective volumes Comrades of journey. The Feminine Experience in Communism (edited by Radu Pavel Gheo and Dan Lungu) and Mihaela Miroiu’s (ed.) The Birth. Lived Stories. Thus, literary materialisations of memory would be observed, in order for the contemporary reader to understand the severe traumatic implications of an abusive ideological prohibition of abortion.

Rewriting Mansfield: Writing, Editing and Translation

<p>This thesis explores the notion, the process and the ethical implications of rewriting, drawing on insights from literary and translation theories, psychoanalysis and trauma studies. It analyses three major forms of rewriting: the author’s, the editor’s and the translator’s. While writing, editing and translation have their own specific norms of production, methodologies, possibilities and limits, all these textual practices are implicitly concerned with the meaning-making process of rewriting. Chapter One presents the central case study of the project: John Middleton Murry’s editing of Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks, which resulted in the publication of Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927). The chapter reviews relevant Mansfield scholarship and discusses textual, methodological and theoretical issues concerning the problem of rewriting. Chapter Two follows the ebb and flow of Mansfield’s own rewriting process by discussing the ways in which she ‘translated’ her notebook entries into her fiction. Chapter Three offers a re-reading of the Journal of Katherine Mansfield and sheds new light on Murry’s controversial editorial manipulation. Chapter Four examines the first Italian translation of the Journal – Diario di Katherine Mansfield, authored by Mara Fabietti in 1933 – and my own re-translation of ‘Life of Ma Parker’ – a 1921 Mansfield story that epitomizes the main themes and issues addressed in this study. This thesis demonstrates how deeply intertwined writing, editing and translating are, and presents an understanding of rewriting as a complex and fascinating process that simultaneously resists meaning and yearns for it.</p>

Rewriting Mansfield: Writing, Editing and Translation

<p>This thesis explores the notion, the process and the ethical implications of rewriting, drawing on insights from literary and translation theories, psychoanalysis and trauma studies. It analyses three major forms of rewriting: the author’s, the editor’s and the translator’s. While writing, editing and translation have their own specific norms of production, methodologies, possibilities and limits, all these textual practices are implicitly concerned with the meaning-making process of rewriting. Chapter One presents the central case study of the project: John Middleton Murry’s editing of Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks, which resulted in the publication of Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927). The chapter reviews relevant Mansfield scholarship and discusses textual, methodological and theoretical issues concerning the problem of rewriting. Chapter Two follows the ebb and flow of Mansfield’s own rewriting process by discussing the ways in which she ‘translated’ her notebook entries into her fiction. Chapter Three offers a re-reading of the Journal of Katherine Mansfield and sheds new light on Murry’s controversial editorial manipulation. Chapter Four examines the first Italian translation of the Journal – Diario di Katherine Mansfield, authored by Mara Fabietti in 1933 – and my own re-translation of ‘Life of Ma Parker’ – a 1921 Mansfield story that epitomizes the main themes and issues addressed in this study. This thesis demonstrates how deeply intertwined writing, editing and translating are, and presents an understanding of rewriting as a complex and fascinating process that simultaneously resists meaning and yearns for it.</p>

Going to Extremes: Post-9/11 Discrimination in Fiction

The aim of the article is to discuss the representation of discrimination and polarization of the American society after the events of 9/11 in Laila Halaby’s novel Once in a Promised Land (2007). The novel presents the point of view of “the Other” and focuses on the analysis of the antagonistic processes in the American society and their outcomes in the lives of ordinary citizens, accused of being “the Other.” The article examines the deterioration of beliefs and values and the “death” of the American Dream. Based on the fundamental theory of Trauma Studies, the article discusses the issues of personal and collective trauma and their representation in Laila Halaby’s novel. Collective traumas may unify or polarize the society–both aspects have had negative outcomes in the USA. Increased patriotism and solidarity were particularly prominent during the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and resulted in the discrimination and polarization of the society, the anger being directed at Muslim communities. The first days of the aftermath marked the start of antagonism on different levels: despite being US citizens, representatives of the Muslim communities experienced harsh reactions in their neighborhoods, jobs, social spheres, etc. For many of those “on the other side” these processes meant the end of their normal lives and dreams. The article examines both the informational and empathic approach used by the author of the novel to disclose irreparable processes that may happen in any society.

Traumatic Experiences and their Representation in Narratives: A Study

With the rise of psychiatric literature and medical humanities, trauma studies have gained significant focus in recent years. The studies that were done by Kidd (2005), Perring (2013), Olive (2014), Seran (2015), Tembo (2017), Hussain et al. (2018), Finck (2006), Durrant (2012), Long (2012), De Mey (2012), Curtis (2015), Karpasitis (2010), Ward (2008) and Dauksaite (2013), particularly, deal with diverse traumatic experiences. At the same time, they also throw light on the issues of the representation of trauma in narratives. They have examined narrative strategies, like the use of transgenerational empathy, intermediality of text and image, syntax disruption, ellipses, text/image layout, repetitions, symbols, photograph insertion, and assimilation, intertexts, framing of panels, inter-textuality, repetition, fragmentation, and flashback, that can be employed to deal with the challenges for the representation of traumatic experiences in narratives. This paper argues that the narrative features and techniques embedded in the narratives can be utilized for the representation and understanding of diverse traumatic experiences. The narrative components like plot (event), character and theme can be analyzed to discuss the psychological trauma of different characters. Researches can also rely on narrative techniques like flashbacks, flashforward, frame story, events in parallel, narrative shift, multi-perspectivity, repetitive designation, epiphany, amplification, imagery, tone, use of repetitive sentence structure, hamartia, peripetia, and comparison to examine how these techniques help represent the psychological trauma of the characters in the narratives.