Books by Iro Filippaki
Palgrave , 2021
The Poetics of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature revisits the great American... more The Poetics of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature revisits the great American post-WWII, postmodern literary texts, namely Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 (1969), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), to fuse high literary theory and criticism with the conception of PTSD symptomatology—and the historico-political developments that dictated the formation of PTSD symptoms and their corresponding literary tropes. For the first time since the portrayal of PTSD as a product of narrative discourses, The Poetics of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature performs an inverse exploration. By identifying key postmodern literary tropes as products of an overarching PTSD narrative paradigm, this accessible and concise study: identifies unexplored aspects of the canonical novels at hand, such as the link between individual and collective traumatization; introduces a novel way of examining trauma at the intersection of narrative, history, and medicine that will be of interest to literary scholars, students, and medical practitioners within narrative medicine alike; and recalibrates the importance of postmodern politics of transformation, while making the case for an aesthetics of trauma.
Articles by Iro Filippaki
Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique, and Thought, 2023
From her seminal study Powers of Horror (1980) to her more recent concep-tualization of maternal ... more From her seminal study Powers of Horror (1980) to her more recent concep-tualization of maternal reliance (2014), the attendant ambivalence of motherhood has been both a recurring theme in Julia Kristeva’s writing as well as her dominant method to demonstrate the affinities between bodily transformation and psychic development. At the same time, the post-war literary narration of motherhood’s “impossible choices”, as one critic has written (Harnett 2019), has left scattered but memorable marks on the contemporary British literary canon. Experimental as well as established British women writers have attempted to document the affective ebb and flow of the maternal body as well as motherhood itself both as an individual experience and as a cultural and socioeconomic institution (Staub 2007). This essay examines such literary works from a Kristevan perspective, attempting a literary tracing of the “herethics” of maternal love (Kristeva 2014) in selected British women authors who have heret(h)ically imagined and articulated maternal ambivalence in the interwar and contemporary era. Employing the post-realist fiction of Olive Moore (1939), Doris Lessing (1988), and Jessie Greengrass (2018) as a springboard for a Kristevan analysis of maternal bodies, it is argued that the conceptualization of a herethics of maternal love finds its literary counterpart in a continuous tradition of women’s exploration of the ambivalent mother through an expe-rimental narrative style, which in turn mirrors the construction of a new maternal body.
Journal of Trauma & Dissociation Volume 22, 2021 - Issue 4: Trauma, Narratives, Institutions: Transdisciplinary Dialogues, 2021
This special issue expands on research into the trauma of betrayal by caregivers (Freyd, 1996) an... more This special issue expands on research into the trauma of betrayal by caregivers (Freyd, 1996) and institutions (Smith & Freyd, 2014) to argue that institutional betrayal can act as a lens through which to understand historical events and political processes. Indeed, the development of contemporary traumatology itself can be understood as a product of, and a response to, the profound institutional betrayals of the Vietnam War. In 1970, the thenpresident of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War association, John Barry, asked eminent psycho-historian Robert Jay Lifton to moderate "rap sessions" so that the veterans who were returning from Vietnam could process the trauma they had undergone (Lifton, 1973, p. 75). While ostensibly therapeutic in purpose, these sessions surfaced the incommensurability between the official US Vietnam War story and the narratives of veterans themselves. As Lifton noted regarding the sessions, where the personal and the political were often discussed in the same breath, rage and potential violence occurred around the theme of betrayal, the veterans' sense of having been victimized, badly used, or as they often out it, 'fucked over,' in having been sent to Vietnam. They spoke about having been misled, put in a situation where they both slaughtered people and suffered for no reason, and then abused or ignored on their return. (Lifton, 1973, p. 140)
Literature and Medicine, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023
In The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), Poe invents the detective story in English, introducing ... more In The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), Poe invents the detective story in English, introducing his gentleman sleuth Auguste Dupin as he solves the locked room mystery of two women found brutally murdered in Paris apartment. In L’amante Anglaise (1967), Duras revisits the detective form, fictionalizing the true 1949 crime of a woman murdering and dismembering her cousin in Viorne, France. These literary detective stories highlight the powerful but unspoken role of affective experience in driving what appears, on the surface, to be a forensic medical or psychological investigation. In both narratives, rational investigation proves lacking as it becomes clear that looking, observing, and tracing causation are instrumentally insufficient for solving the mystery or even encompassing the whole story. Similar to medical investigative processes, the inquiries in Duras’ and Poe’s works are spurred by peculiarity, but simultaneously the motive of each horrendous crime is elusive. In these tales, peculiarity is an affective and cognitive force that, contrary to what the majority of affect literature argues, inherently contains moves toward resolution and closure. By using peculiarity as an analytical concept, this essay examines the gap between knowing the facts and understanding the mystery, shaped by the shared affect between investigator, object or subject of investigation, and target audience that is often omitted in classic diagnostic investigations, but interpolated within the literary detective narrative. How is the clinical process reimagined in the detective genre, and how could the latter inform the former? Through tracing the relationship between clinical investigation and affective experience, we propose that the binaries of the process (concealment and discovery) can be enriched by acknowledging the affective forces at play exemplified in detective fiction, breaking a barrier between narrative scholarship and medical practice.
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, 2020
In Stratis Myrivilis' semi-autobiographical anti-war 1923 novel Life in the Tomb, i the fictional... more In Stratis Myrivilis' semi-autobiographical anti-war 1923 novel Life in the Tomb, i the fictional protagonist Kostoulas writes letters to his fiancée, describing his physical and emotional state as a soldier at the Macedonian front of the World War I. In this essay I read Myrivilis' novel as an illuminating test case for the complications and resonance of the concept of 'resilience' both as core affect and a generative mode of historical witnessing. Myrivilis' exemplary modernist text reveals the close formal and structural affinities between affective modernism and tropes of narrative resilience. In order to showcase the formal mechanisms of resilience, I close-read Life in the Tomb to trace instances of physical and emotional resilience, while arguing that Myrivilis' "accidental modernism," as it has been termed by Peter Bien, (1990, 1523:56-60) is intentionally formalist in an effort to depict modernist endurance to war trauma. Opting to tell the story of what history, and the war, feels like, Myrivilis (through Kostoulas) employs the formalist tropes of defamiliarization and the grotesque to narrate resilience as affective interpenetration between individual and collective states of being.
Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, Taylor & Francis, 2019
Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper (2016... more Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper (2016) are horror films that depict violence in a subtle, yet powerful way. Instead of depicting physical mutilation, these films convey a disturbing atmosphere, as it were, of a polyvalent violent intensity enabled by and simultaneously reveals the economic terms and demands of affective neoliberalism, and is not represented by visuals of blood and gore. In this essay I demonstrate that the concepts of affect and suspense in both films are linked through an economy of debt. Additionally, I close-read parts of the films to show that they belong to the genre of the neurothriller, as their focused portrayal of violent affect displaces the importance of the narrative plot. Overall, I will build on the concept of the neurothriller to show that Assayas and Lanthimos scaffold violent intensity by weaving the market logic of neoliberalism into their films, thus creating a neoliberal neurothriller.
Alicante Journal of English Studies 31 (2018): 185-193, 2018
This essay performs a narratological reading of 2014 video games Valiant
Hearts and Super Trench ... more This essay performs a narratological reading of 2014 video games Valiant
Hearts and Super Trench Attack and the ways through which they memorialize the Great War. By close-reading the narrative techniques of
these games, I argue that through their storytelling elements they memorialize the Great War by countering the narrative trope of the adynaton, often employed to manage the traumatic articulation of war narratives. Bathetic, pathetic, and chronotopic representations contribute to the affective economy on which these video games rely to memorialize the war, and hint at what posthumanist memorialization could mean for the remembrance of Great War.
Twentieth Century Communism: Memory and Nostalgia , 2016
January 2015 records the pinnacle of left presence in Greece, as the country elects a leftist gov... more January 2015 records the pinnacle of left presence in Greece, as the country elects a leftist government for the first time in parliamentary history. The ‘Greek Depression’ (Kaiser 2011) slowly but surely revitalized a communist ethos for many Greek citizens, similar to what Paul Betts describes as ‘surprising passion and even longing’ (2014). This communist nostalgia is illustrated in Renio Dragasaki’s 2012 short film entitled Dad, Lenin and Freddy. Dragasaki’s story spans the years between 1980 and 1990, depicting the lifestyle of a family immersed in communist ideas and framed by communist ‘retro’ aesthetics up to the demise of the left altogether (Calotychos 2013). Daddy, Lenin and Freddy is seen here as a par excellence example of communist nostalgia, narrating landmark events of Greek politics of the time from the perspective of a 6 year old girl. In short, this article is looking at the legacy of communist nostalgia in post-dictatorship Greece, a nostalgia that, for middle and upper classes, has been predominantly mediated through a cultural-materialist progress and a celebration of commodities. Following Raymond Williams (2005), communist nostalgia in 2015 Greece is a cultural practice whose residue has been a reverberation of the communist experience of other Eastern European countries in the first instance. Simultaneously, this nostalgia’s presence forms the country’s current cultural identity.
Book chapters by Iro Filippaki
files.wordpress.com/2014/12/woolf-on-being-ill.pdf, accessed on May 23 2022. In recent times, Pau... more files.wordpress.com/2014/12/woolf-on-being-ill.pdf, accessed on May 23 2022. In recent times, Paul Kalanithi's end of life memoir and less well-known Tom Lubbock's pub lished diaries, both works posthumously published, are enlightening examples in this instance.
Transatlantic Shell Shock: British and American Literatures of World War I Trauma, 2019
American author and volunteer nurse Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), British poet Edith S... more American author and volunteer nurse Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), British poet Edith Sitwell’s I Live Under a Black Sun (1937), and British-Australian writer Evadne Price’s Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War (1930) narrate Great War shell shock through dialogical descriptions that contest one of the most prevalent Great War tropes: the sublimity and unnarratability of war trauma. Borden’s narrative was written as a creative testimony of her contribution in the war as a head nurse and consists of sketches and poems; Sitwell’s novel is a political allegory that satirizes Jonathan Swift’s life if it were set during the Great War; and Price’s novel is a reworking of ambulance driver Winifred Youngs’s Great War diaries. A comparison between these American and British narratives of the Great War reveals that Borden, Price, and Sitwell employ similar tropes to represent shell shock, namely the pastoral and the Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Not only does this tropological representation provide alternative views to the role of women in the Great War, both at the front and at home, but, importantly, pastoral and carnivalesque elements construct a picture of anti-sublimity. Quotidian, automatic, and repetitive elements cancel out the ineffability, immeasurability, and transcendence of traditional war representation, contributing to an understanding of shell shock in narrative terms, and to a measuring of trauma in terms of human scale.
Book Reviews by Iro Filippaki
Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, No 13: Just art. Documentary Poetics and Justice, 2020
New humanities for the new wounded In one of the outtakes of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), the ... more New humanities for the new wounded In one of the outtakes of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), the epic nine and a half-hour documentary comprising testimonies of survivors, perpetrators, eyewitnesses, and scholars of the Holocaust, four surviving Jews are filmed by Lanzmann and his crew walking down a cobbled street in Corfu, Greece. As they awkwardly reach the camera, one of the men (Armando Aaron), starts talking, as if hypnotized, explaining (in French) that on June 9, 1944, the Jews of Corfu (numbering 1,650) were ordered by the Germans to gather near an old Venetian fort in the city. 1 The scene is cut short after, but as the outtake continues, the four men's walk towards the camera crew is filmed again and again, its continuity
Discussion about asexuality has been on the rise since 2010 and there are quite a few collections... more Discussion about asexuality has been on the rise since 2010 and there are quite a few collections of articles that have attempted to define asexuality as a movement within and out of the margins of sexual normativity. Compiled by academics and smartly divided into chapters, the present collection of research articles endeavors to penetrate the obscure issue of asexuality as a social construct, an alternative (non) expression of desire, and, interestingly enough, a parallel political path. Painstakingly collected statistical evidence is provided in many of the articles, and it is that evidence which runs in perfect harmony with Michel Foucault and Judith Butler"s more theoretical concept of gender as a socially constructed
Interview by Iro Filippaki
Alicante Journal of English Studies, 2018
Iro Filippaki and Stefan Aguirre Quiroga exchange their views on the potentiality of video games ... more Iro Filippaki and Stefan Aguirre Quiroga exchange their views on the potentiality of video games as historical and educational resources in the study of the First World War.
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Books by Iro Filippaki
Articles by Iro Filippaki
Hearts and Super Trench Attack and the ways through which they memorialize the Great War. By close-reading the narrative techniques of
these games, I argue that through their storytelling elements they memorialize the Great War by countering the narrative trope of the adynaton, often employed to manage the traumatic articulation of war narratives. Bathetic, pathetic, and chronotopic representations contribute to the affective economy on which these video games rely to memorialize the war, and hint at what posthumanist memorialization could mean for the remembrance of Great War.
Book chapters by Iro Filippaki
Book Reviews by Iro Filippaki
Interview by Iro Filippaki
Hearts and Super Trench Attack and the ways through which they memorialize the Great War. By close-reading the narrative techniques of
these games, I argue that through their storytelling elements they memorialize the Great War by countering the narrative trope of the adynaton, often employed to manage the traumatic articulation of war narratives. Bathetic, pathetic, and chronotopic representations contribute to the affective economy on which these video games rely to memorialize the war, and hint at what posthumanist memorialization could mean for the remembrance of Great War.