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.

The Right to Meaning: A Syrian Case Study

This article unsettles what the literature describes as the ‘central paradox’ of cultural trauma theory: the idea that while atrocities are most prevalent in the ‘non-western world’, successful cultural traumas have primarily emerged in western societies. Examining the engagement of exiled Syrian intellectuals with the traumatic events of the 2011 revolution-turned-war in their country, the author argues that it is not a failure in the ‘cultural trauma process’ itself that prevents horrific events in non-western contexts from becoming recognised as cultural traumas. Instead, it is the failure to translate narratives of wrongdoing into formal acknowledgements and material or symbolic reparations. This failure is articulated by Syrian intellectuals as a ‘denial of meaning’. Many Syrian intellectuals construed the emancipatory demands of the Syrian uprising as claims for a right to meaning, that is, demands to restore language and existential purpose through public engagement and the revival of politics and speech. Equally, they saw as ‘denial of meaning’ the reality that their trauma work did not prevent the endurance and gradual rehabilitation of the regime but was met instead with the relegation of the movement to the agenda of the War on Terror. Thus, building on the discourses of exiled Syrian intellectuals, the article presents the idea of the right to meaning as a framework for understanding global inequality. Such a framework rests on a perceived dichotomy between those entitled to ‘meaning’ and those whose lives are accepted and treated as devoid of it or denied it.

Incredible but Very Real: 3D Cinema and Trauma in the Wake of WWII and 9/11

<p>This thesis investigates Hollywood and global Hollywood 3D cinema at the height of its box office success, the early fifties, and from 2009-2014. Discourse surrounding 3D cinema in both periods is governed largely by technological and economic arguments. While this discourse holds some merit, it overlooks the cultural and historical background against which 3D cinema rose to prominence. Shifting research focus from the technological and economic to the cultural, this project uncovers the presence of trauma in 3D cinema of the fifties and D3D of the new millennium, and argues 3D cinema to be a privileged form to engage with traumatic themes. As trauma is uncovered in 3D cinema, connections are drawn between the narratives and poetics of the films discussed and post-traumatic themes prevalent in the US post WWII, and post September 11 respectively. Focusing on questions of representation, embodiment and temporality, which hold a central role both in 3D cinema and trauma theory, this project finds that 3D cinema narratives and poetics of each period resonated with the cultural trauma that preceded it.</p>

Incredible but Very Real: 3D Cinema and Trauma in the Wake of WWII and 9/11

<p>This thesis investigates Hollywood and global Hollywood 3D cinema at the height of its box office success, the early fifties, and from 2009-2014. Discourse surrounding 3D cinema in both periods is governed largely by technological and economic arguments. While this discourse holds some merit, it overlooks the cultural and historical background against which 3D cinema rose to prominence. Shifting research focus from the technological and economic to the cultural, this project uncovers the presence of trauma in 3D cinema of the fifties and D3D of the new millennium, and argues 3D cinema to be a privileged form to engage with traumatic themes. As trauma is uncovered in 3D cinema, connections are drawn between the narratives and poetics of the films discussed and post-traumatic themes prevalent in the US post WWII, and post September 11 respectively. Focusing on questions of representation, embodiment and temporality, which hold a central role both in 3D cinema and trauma theory, this project finds that 3D cinema narratives and poetics of each period resonated with the cultural trauma that preceded it.</p>

The aesthetic sublimation of pain in Niyi Osundare’s City Without People

Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet-scholar, who was a victim of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana. A few years after the cataclysmic event, Osundare versified his experience in the poetry volume entitled City Without People. This article examines the narration of his painful experience and memories in the collection. I begin by exploring the thematization of pain in the volume, before proceeding to argue that the poet’s pain, largely psychic, is a product of losses of various kinds. The article goes further, demonstrating how the poet “worked through” the pain to attain wellness. Relying on insights from trauma theory, complemented by some assumptions about the concept of scriptotherapy, the analysis of poems drawn from across the collection demonstrates the paradox of using pain to birth writing and using writing to kill pain.

Written on the Heart, Erased from the Mind

Can there be moral agency without autonomy? Absent the freedom to deliberate, make a choice, and enact a decision, does the covenantal relationship described in Jeremiah 31 understand fidelity to God to be anything more than involuntary obedience? Put differently, if both the covenantal requirements and the decision to obey them are externally inscribed on the human heart, if like computer software they are “programmed” into the operating system, do humans automatically surrender their freedom for thinking about moral decisions? This chapter examines the language of moral selfhood (both divine and human) in Jeremiah, with special attention to trauma theory as a hermeneutical lens for thinking about the “wounding of the mind” wrought by the experience of exile.

The Unprescence of China’s COVID-19 Trauma and Its Impact on Social Identity

In the psychology and literary fields, the theoretical study of trauma has received increasing attention. It is widely applied by experts and scholars across various aspects, such as war, gender and so on. To give it more practical significance, the main object of this study is to investigate the modern use of trauma by connecting it to the topic of a nation. China, the country first plagued by COVID-19&mdash;a representative modern trauma&mdash;has suffered not only physically but also mentally. This paper will analyze how trauma affects a nation by using classical theories on trauma, such as those from Sigmund Freud and Cathy Caruth. In terms of national collective trauma, new theories from Roger Luckhurst and Jeffrey C. Alexander would also be adopted. To achieve the sophisticated link between trauma and nation, the unprescence of trauma and its social identity threat to China are further discussed as main parts of this essay. This research will encourage a more rational treatment of collective trauma sufferers and calls for the realistic and practical use of the literary trauma theory.