Literature and Trauma

Biblical poetry, in particular the psalms of lament, provides a model of how composing one's own lament and performing it to God can be a positive element in healing the effects of trauma. In an empirical study, Zulu youth who had experienced various forms of trauma, learned to use the model of biblical psalms of lament to compose their own laments. The process of regaining agency, establishing a sense of justice (with an appeal for the perpetrator of the hurt to be punished), and a rekindling of hope for life going forward, all elements of biblical lament, are also vital parts of the healing process. Thus it is suggested that the use of poetry, in the form of biblical lament, can contribute to the healing of those who have suffered trauma.

Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) enacts a narrative return to the violent trauma of Aboriginal dispossession and destruction upon which Australia is founded, situating its reader complexly, as both witness to and complicit in the events it retells. Her use of fiction to represent this trauma made Grenville the focus of heated public debate about the role of fiction in representing the past, a debate that repeatedly cast her project as historically dubious. However, rather than approaching the novel as a corrupted form of history’s reconstruction of past events, it seems more useful to situate this text as an act of memory in the present, which shapes both past and future. Even as it represents the past, Grenville’s novel addresses a present both deeply divided and in danger of forgetting its history. It uses the affective power of fiction to reinscribe and reactivate Aboriginal Australian history in the contemporary historical imaginary.

Elias Khoury’s novel Bab el Shams (Gate of the Sun), which came out in 1998 symbolically marking fifty years to the Palestinian Nakba, is perhaps the most comprehensive narrative of this ongoing event. This fascinating novel has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. My suggested reading of the novel is inspired by and juxtaposed with Holocaust literature
and what might be called ‘Holocaust related critical theory’. This reading, I contend, is invited by the novel itself and is pursued from the perspective of a Jewish Israeli Holocaust and trauma scholar. The main argument of this essay is that the novel deals with the unsettling conjuncture of the extremely destabilizing, traumatized and decentred testimony of the Palestinian victim–
witness and the essential, collective Palestinian national epos  that frames these individual traumatized narratives. The former inevitably undermines the latter while, at the same time, the latter collectively frames the former. These tensions, integrations and disintegrations form the core theme of Gate
of the Sun. To put it differently, I contend that this novel is about the unsettling paradoxes of writing a polyphonic non-monolithic decentralized collective epos. This narrative of collective and individual traumas manages to unsettle old national structures and ultimately invites binational thinking.

La première pièce de Joanna Laurens, The Three Birds, (2000) propose une révision dramatique du mythe grec de Philomèle qui s’inscrit en contrepoint de la fable telle qu’elle est relatée dans les Métamorphoses d’Ovide. Le rapport à la langue et à la figure du barbare, paradigme de l’Autre, engage une réflexion sur la question des minorités, la voix de l’étranger et l’idée d’une réversibilité des postures. Barbarismes, irrégularités syntaxiques, « babélisation » font ici violence au langage ainsi qu’aux différentes langues parlées dans la pièce qui s’altèrent et se barbarisent à l’image des personnages, incarnant ainsi dans la chair du verbe la mutilation de la langue qui fait la matière cruelle du mythe. Au cœur de la pièce, elle-même réécriture d’une autre pièce – celle, perdue, du Térée de Sophocle – on retrouve en effet l’écriture d’une autre scène – celle, tabou, du viol et de l’amputation de la langue de Philomèle – qui, à défaut de pouvoir se dire, vient s’écrire sur la tapisserie que brode la jeune fille à l’attention de sa sœur pour révéler le crime étouffé par les mensonges en cascades de Térée en même temps qu’elle se reflète dans la trituration du langage. Cet article s’intéressera donc aux enjeux de la réécriture en tant que mise en place d’une alternative fondamentale à partir d’une perspective neuve – celle du barbare amoureux, ou plutôt de la barbarie de l’amour impossible – qui se reflète dans le motif intradiégétique de l’activité de tissage en tant qu’écriture de « l’Autre » (réécriture par l’Autre, la femme, de l’autre scène ou de l’autre pièce, qui ne peut être dite). Avec la duplicité intrinsèque du langage et l’exploration de son potentiel de transformation, nous verrons dès lors comment l’altérité se donne plutôt à voir comme altération, voire aliénation, jusqu’au creux de la langue où elle prend naissance pour la faire délirer (Deleuze). Le langage de la pièce reflète ainsi la façon dont l’humain vient faire trace dans la langue du barbare et montre comment, par-delà l’humanisation du Thrace, la barbarie vient à son tour réinvestir l’humain et marquer de son empreinte l’acte et le langage d’amour devenus viols. En déroulant à l’extrême le fil ténu qui sépare humanité et barbarie, les expérimentations poétiques de Laurens, où le langage et « l’autre » du langage se rencontrent dans leurs contradictions-mêmes, permettent ainsi de renouveler le sens du mythe grec autant que le langage dramatique sur la scène théâtrale à l’aube du vingt-et-unième siècle.

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Joanna Laurens’ first play The Three Birds (2000) is a retelling of the Greek myth of Philomela in which language undergoes a poetic treatment unprecedented on the contemporary British stage. Mirroring and enacting the characters’ evolution from innocence to barbarism, language is distorted and altered to an extreme through a creative process involving word coinage (i.e. barbarisms), syntactic irregularities, and ‘babelisation,’ thus bringing out and performing the violence of the myth. Departing from Ovid’s poem which is itself a reworking of the original fable, as well as from the feminist takes on the story during the second half of the twentieth century, Laurens’ dramatic writing offers a new approach to the language and figure of the Barbarian, a traditional paradigm of the Other. She addresses such issues as the oppression of minorities, the voice of the stranger, and the reversibility of ethical positions by providing a reflection on the intrinsic duplicity of language itself and by exploring its potential for ‘metamorphosis’ and manipulation, thus presenting otherness as alienation. At the core of the play, which is a rewriting of another (lost) tragedy – that of Sophocles’ Tereus –, are Tereus’ lies, which are a rewriting of another (taboo) story – that of Philomela’s rape and amputated tongue. Although it can’t be verbally expressed by the young woman, this traumatic episode is nonetheless revealed through a tapestry she weaves for her sister Procné to denounce the crime of the lying husband, the needlework compensating her lost voice. This article thus looks at the issues at stake in Laurens’ rewriting, which can be read as the Other of the Greek myth and its famous feminist interpretations. Not only does her play propose an alternative which stems from an unusual, profoundly humane perspective – the suffering of a man whose love is thwarted – but this reversal is also mirrored in the intradiegetic motif of the tapestry as a writing of the Other (the scene behind the scenes, unheard of) by the Other (the abused, silenced woman). I propose to study how the Other comes to be inscribed at the core of language where it takes shape, rendering it delirious (Deleuze), as humanity can be traced in the Barbarian and barbarism can in turn affect humanity beyond the figure of the Thracian. As the act and language of love are turned into linguistic abuse and physical rape, Laurens’ formal experimentations, where language and the Other of language meet at the crossroad of their own contradictions, allow for a renewal in the meaning of the Greek myth as well as in the dramatic language on the British stage at the start of the twenty-first century.

This article presents a quasi-experimental study of a mindfulness-based intervention for traumatically bereaved individuals using a single group with pre-test and post-test design. The intervention consists of the ATTEND model, which is comprised of the following elements practiced by the clinician: attunement, trust, therapeutic touch, egalitarianism, nuance, and death education. The study is based on the charts of 42 clients seeking grief counseling at a mental health agency viewed retrospectively. Participants' intake scores on the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), which measures trauma symptoms, and 25-item Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL-25), which measures depressive and anxious symptoms, were compared to their scores after an average of 14.64 hours of counseling. Paired samples t tests showed a statistically significant decline in trauma symptoms on the IES-R, and in anxious and depressive symptoms on the HSCL-25. These results provide preliminary support for the use of this mindfulness-based approach for difficulties associated with traumatic bereavement, though more extensive research is needed to determine the effectiveness of this approach.

This article explores the approach of narrative by trauma survivors in general and the fictional character Etsuko of Kazuo Ishiguro in particular from his novel A Pale View of Hills. It examines how narrative re-building and fictionalization of her own story Etsuko of the same novel pronounces her own healing through self deceptive language. And how the fictionalization of narrative helps her heal the past angst and trauma. This particular issue of trauma and how narrating the turmoil help release the pain shall be discussed in the light of few instances taken from Greek myth and a French film along with some clinical case study of trauma patients.

Many children in South Africa grow up in townships, where they are exposed to violence, drugs, gangs, and poverty. Difficulties in their home situations result in many of them lacking soft skills that enable a person to thrive (such as self-esteem, self-confidence, and the ability to communicate well). This chronic deprivation is an ongoing trauma which requires intervention to promote healing. Using the arts and sport to provide such intervention has been found to be successful, but theorists posit that drama could have value for social and emotional learning. This study tests that hypothesis: two groups (a group of grade 7 learners and a group of adults from a Bible-study fellowship) participate in a dramatic presentation of the biblical story of Ruth. Over a period of six months, the participants meet weekly (in their respective groups) for an hour to learn the story and find their way of expressing it. Three performances before various audiences are presented. To highlight emotional issues in the story, a jester is included in the cast, with the role of interrupting the story at appropriate places and asking the audience questions as to the motivations and moods of the characters. This prompts the audience to reflect on their own emotional responses to various difficult situations with which they readily identify. By considering their own viewpoints, and those of others, audience members are stretched in their social and emotional learning. Moreover, it is apparent that, through the drama experience, the actors gain significantly in self-esteem, self-confidence, and their ability to speak in public before an audience (even adult strangers). This article provides a stimulus for using performance of a biblical text to explore options for dealing with traumatic situations.

The presence of absence is a core element in archival theory and practice (Derrida, 1996). Much of the power and meaning in Jon Rafman’s work owes its existence to something that is
absent – to what it lacks – as much as to what is present to it and within it. To remember the past, to archive the past is as much about representing loss as it is about curating what remains. An
anxiety about the presence and absence of the past permeates Rafman's work. For loss, be it the actual or dreaded loss of a loved one, of a cherished ideal, country or ideology is a universal
human experience. Despite the often haunted attempt to protect against its pain, the cherished lost ideal or love must be represented, rendered fixed in some manner, must be made known, be made sacred, revered or devalued, be placed in a repository, be it memory, history or virtual worlds. Thus Benjamin, Derrida and Foucault underscore the centrality and yet the difficulty of the idea of archive.

Penser la projection comme un opérateur entre littérature et cinéma comporte un risque méthodologique évident, celui de la métaphore : comment se prémunir de la facilité improductive d'une réflexion sur le film qui, du moment qu'il adapte un livre, « projetterait » naturellement des images sur un texte ? Comment, à l'inverse, ne pas considérer toute description littéraire d'images filmiques comme un appel à la projection mentale du lecteur ? L'un des moyens de contourner ce danger est peut-être de prendre la projection à la lettre, c'est-à-dire comme le dispositif spectaculaire spécifique du cinéma, et de bâtir un corpus d'étude mixte où des récits écrits et filmiques sont liés par un processus de réécriture transmédiatique qui, sans relever de l'adaptation, les articule à travers le motif d'une projection d'images dans une salle obscure.

Mit der vorliegenden Studie wird erstmals für die Psalmenexegese eine Monographie unter der Perspektive der interdisziplinären Traumaforschung vorgelegt. Die Arbeit erschließt, wie sich traumatische Ereignisse auf die narrativ-ästhetische Darstellungsform der Psalmen niedergeschlagen haben. Mit Hilfe klassisch-philologischer, literaturwissenschaftlicher und psychologischer Ansätze wird an den einzelnen Psalmen eine Phänomenologie des literarischen Umgangs mit traumatischen Erfahrungen aufgezeigt. Die Traumaforschung dient dabei in zweifacher Hinsicht der Erschließung der Texte: zum einen für ihren antiken Entstehungshintergrund, der kollektive wie individuelle Gewalterfahrungen verarbeitet und zum anderen für die Analyse der rezeptionsästhetischen Aneignungsprozesse der Texte. Die Arbeit liefert wichtige Einsichten für die zentralen Themen der Psalmenforschung: Hermeneutik der Gewalt, Umgang mit Leid, das Gottesbild, die Rolle der Klage, die Anthropologie. Darüber hinaus gibt sie auch Impulse für den aktuellen gesellschaftlichen Diskurs der kollektiven Erinnerung und für das Ausloten von narrativ-poetischen Strategien der Traumabewältigung.

Since the second half of the 1970s, a corpus of studies focusing on the history of women during the Holocaust has been produced. These studies assert that even though Jewish women shared the annihilation threat with the men, Jewish women also underwent unique experiences resulting from their female physiology, their female socialization, and the National Socialist Weltanschauung directed against them. These different experiences were also expressed visually in numerous works of art made by women during the Holocaust era (1939–49). Their art is rife with images of pregnancy, motherhood, feminine crafts such as domestic chores, cooking, female solidarity and mutual assistance, loss of femininity, and sexual violence. This article focuses especially on women's artistic expression of three of these topics: mutual assistance among women, loss of femininity, and sexual violence, all of which have received little attention in Holocaust art research.

These voices of utopia, inseparable from the experience of dislocation, are a unique contribution to the literature of testimony. With her cycle Svetlana Alexievich has established herself as the first major postcolonial author of post-Communism: the daughter of a Ukrainian and Belarusian who uses the Russian language – the only language in which she is completely fluent – to collect and present, from her own subaltern perspective, subaltern accounts of the traumas inflicted by empire.

Literarische Texte über traumatische Erfahrungen legen sich stets
eine eigenartige Sprache zu: die Sprache nämlich, in der das Trauma – dessen wichtigster Grundzug es doch ist, verschwiegen zu werden – schließlich doch noch erzählt und so auch verwunden werden kann. Traumatexte werden oft als Geständnisse, narrative Heilungsprozesse verstanden. Es entsteht um die Wende vom 20. zum 21. Jahrhundert in der Tat eine Vielzahl literarischer Texte, zu deren Verständnis die Ansatzpunkte der Traumatheorien einen wichtigen Beitrag leisten können. Die literarischen Traumatexte scheinen nämlich auf den ersten Blick entweder nüchtern und emotionslos, ja sogar kalt zu sein (bekannte Bespiele sind Roman eines Schicksallosen von Imre Kertész, Asszony a fronton [Frau an der Front] von Alaine Polcz und die Erzählungen von Ida Fink), oder aber sie erwecken im Gegenteil den Anschein, zu gefühlsam, geschwätzig, offenherzig, ja bedrückend ehrlich zu sein. Zu dieser letzten Gruppe gehören zumeist Schriften, die eben in Folge dieser Eigenschaften nicht zur hohen Literatur gezählt werden: Holocaust‐Memoiren, Briefe, Autobiographien. Den Lesern fällt es schwer, in diesen Werken die Spuren eines Traumas – die Unfähigkeit es auszusprechen, den Drang daran vorbeizureden –, kurzum die Elemente zu entdecken, die ihnen diese ungewohnten emotionellen und ästhetischen Erfahrungen zuteil werden lassen, weshalb sie viel zu oft ablehnend reagieren. Das Lesen traumatischer Texte erfordert von dem Rezipienten
ja mehr Offenheit und eine größere Bereitschaft, an seelischen
Lasten zu tragen, als die Rezeption eines durchschnittlichen
literarischen Werks, um von der Lektüre der Unterhaltungsliteratur ganz zu schweigen. Das Trauma lässt sich ja zum Teil auch während der Lektüre miterleben – vor allem dank der Wirksamkeit spezifischer
Texteffekte. Ich erörtere in der vorliegenden Abhandlung die
Wirkungsmechanismen der traumatheoretischen Interpretationsstrategien anhand der Auslegung von Gabriella Nagys Schrift Fall.

Franz Kafka's Letter to His Father is one of the greatest examples in world literature of memory of a traumatic childhood. In it, the author takes a retrospective journey through his life, recollecting and analyzing the reasons for the estrangement and hostility between a father and a son. This essay considers Letter to His Father in the light of current knowledge about autobiographical memory. The essay first sets forth basic aspects of Kafka's life in order to place Letter to His Father in the context of Kafka's biography, and then presents Kafka's relevance to the literature and thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essay then considers the different forms of childhood abuse and their consequences in light of evidence from neurodevelopmental psychology. We present evidence about the relationship between trauma and the construction of self-image. Furthermore, we discuss the subjectivity of Kafka's recollections from the perspective of recent advances in neurobiology. Memory is shown to be dynamic, selective, inherently malleable and dependent on perception, which is a subjective construction, in which the brain interprets and gives coherence to experienced stimuli. We consider the inaccuracy of memory, which is related to neuroplastic changes in the brain that take place over time: consolidation, reconsolidation and transformation. Finally, the relationship between literature and autobiography in the Kafkaesque universe is considered.

Trauma theory, especially associated with the works of Cathy Caruth and Judith Lewis Herman, is expressed by Sigmund Freud especially in his works Studies in Hysteria, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism. According to him, trauma is the result of fright which is different from fear and dread. It is different because they both anticipate the danger, but fright is an abrupt experience. The repetitive feature of this unexpected fright is important as well. In this respect, the main problem is actually readaptation to life aftermath of the traumatic event. Otto Rank, a beloved student of Freud, takes this theory a step further and develops the Trauma of Birth theory, in which all the important points in the life of individual are directly associated with birth and father is of secondary importance. Incorporating these theories, D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers has sparkling characters like Gertrude, William and Paul each of whom experiences traumatic events. In this study, it is aimed to display and to examine the tragic but persevering efforts of the characters in the work to cope with the trauma in their own way.

From vampires and werewolves to fairies, Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847) is filled with creatures more fitting a penny dreadful than a canonical work of Victorian fiction. Monsters stalk the shadowed halls of Thornfield in the altered forms of Rochester, Jane and Bertha. Rochester emerges from the fire that claims Bertha's life deformed and symbolically castrated, resembling a beast more than a man. Jane wanders the lone moors like a fairy or imp accosting the belated traveler of Rochester and frustrating him with her otherworldly presence. Bertha, the famous madwoman in the attic, adopts the role of vampire representing a monstrous colonial parasite and sexualized anti-woman.

「白色恐怖」之為一種國家暴力，是解嚴後台灣社會揮之不去的集體記憶，同時也顯露了種種創傷的癥候。本文有意自一個比較的視野出發，著眼於戰後創傷經驗的可比較性、以及東、西方「見證」觀的互譯性，期能透過挖掘台灣「白色恐怖見證文學」獨特的表現／癥候、同時部份借助文學或文化理論的介入，有效地檢視並解剖其敘事，覺察並梳理其繼承；一方面建立白色恐怖創傷敘事的公共意義，另方面探尋白色恐怖成為台灣社會「文化創傷」的可能基礎。

本研究主要以四位具代表性的白色恐怖見證小說家相關作品為中心，首先取徑「癥候式閱讀」，企圖指出台灣白色恐怖見證小說中存在著的種種「闕現象」是值得論者「正視」的對象；據此歸納出數種典型的白色恐怖文學敘事，同時察覺「詩意」作為一種再現歷史暴力的途徑，在台灣白色恐怖見證小說中佔有了壟斷性的地位。本研究繼而透過考察其中以視覺為媒介再現的種種創傷癥候，在「見」或「不見」、「可見」或「不可見」的獨特視域、與辯證「觀點」中，追索了台灣白色恐怖見證小說擺盪在戰後西方「見證」觀的神聖性崇高、與中國魯迅「看客」觀的國民性創傷之間，一種特殊的視覺與暴力的聯繫；也作為了理解台灣白色恐怖見證小說中種種弔詭與矛盾來源的一種嘗試。最後，本研究透過「文化創傷」理論的介入，企圖指出從個人到集體、從創傷到文化創傷，在再現歷史、敘述創傷、記憶政治的社會過程中，文學敘事從過去到未來可能扮演的角色，以及可能達致的效果。

Hispánica, nº59, Tokio: Asociación Japonesa de Hispanistas, 2015, pp.61-83.

La novela Soinujolearen semea (2003) de Bernardo Atxaga, traducida al castellano por el propio autor como El hijo del acordeonista (2004), merece especial atención tanto por su importancia en la trayectoria del escritor vasco como por su riqueza estructural y semántica. La novela se presenta como el libro autobiográfico de David, el protagonista, pero también el libro de Joseba, quien “reescribe y amplía” las memorias que dejó escritas su amigo. El presente artículo pretende profundizar en su complejidad estructural a través de un análisis de las funciones de la reescritura de Joseba. Se analiza especialmente cómo son narradas las experiencias traumáticas que David quería afrontar en el proceso de escritura de su libro, en qué parte y por cuál de los dos autores-narradores dentro de la novela. Se comprueban los diferentes grados de realización de la narración de los hechos traumáticos por parte de David, así como los efectos de la intervención de Joseba a través de la escritura, reescritura y edición de los textos de ambos.

「ベルナルド・アチャガ『アコーディオン弾きの息子』の構造における二人の作者の機能」、『イスパニカ』第59号、2015年、61-83頁。

In 11/9/2001, the whole world, was astounded to hear the news of the World
Trade Center's destruction and collapse. On this day, the city of New York mourned,
not only for the lives of people who died in these buildings, but also the for the loss of
one of the landmarks of the 21st century. Since then, the pain, the suffering and the
feelings of agony and anger, took many different forms.
The purpose of this research paper, is to analyze the forms in which, one of the
greatest disasters, was depicted through the art of fiction, the art of poetry and the art
of comics and graphic novels. The main criteria for the works chosen, will be the
cconcept of trauma and how its depicted.
In the first part, there will be a short reference to the main event, that was the
reason which gave birth to the works, that will be analyzed later on.
The second part will include one crucial work of fiction (Extremely Loud and
Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer) and a partial analysis on how 9/11 trauma
concept, was depicted in that story.
The third part will include one poem (Last words” by Michael Symmons
Roberts) written after the time of the tragedy.
The fourth and last part will include 1 graphic novel (Heroes: The World's
Greatest Super Hero Creators Honor The World's Greatest Heroes 9-11-2001 by Kurt
Busiek, Paul Dini, Kevin Smith, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman etc.), created in order to
honour the real heroes of the society and their sacrifices in the face of danger.

Talking about his most unconventional plays, Attempts on Her Life (1997) and Fewer Emergencies (2005), British playwright Martin Crimp recently said that "in this second kind of writing, the dramatic space is a mental space, not a physical one." Picking up on this expression, I propose to look at the main characteristics of a ‘theatre of the mental space’ which, since Samuel Beckett, delves into individual psychological complexes, traumas, neuroses, and even psychiatric disorders from alternating and often marginalized points of view through the use of hypersubjective figures and indistinct voices instead of traditional, defined characters. In Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, the suicide character of Anne who, in scenario 11, "quite clearly should’ve been admitted […] to a psychiatric unit […] where she could receive treatment," is used as a means to explore the secret fears and obsessions that filter through the voices of anonymous and undefined characters who comment upon her life and death. Sarah Kane's last two pieces, Crave (1998) and 4.48 Psychosis (2000) show a similar, converging evolution of her dramatic writing towards what could be termed a "psychopoetics of the stage," this time using a first-person perspective.

More broadly, the construction of dramatic spaces which are no longer physical but psychological and which investigate either specific "mentalities" (Crimp) or the mind as a dramatic world in itself seems to characterize a specific turn in contemporary theatre. Through new, unconventional forms of dialogue, monologue, and narration, these stylised explorations of our "dramas-in-the-head" form what could be labelled ‘In-Your-Head’ theatre, as opposed to the famous "In-Yer-Face" theatre (Aleks Sierz) which characterized the British stage of the 1990s. In addition to Crimp’s and Kane’s plays under the influence of Samuel Beckett’s theatre, I propose to see how other British playwrights such as Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, and debbie tucker green also evoke the tortuous and haunted mindscapes of vanishing subjects, leading to a "trauma-poetics."

Using works by literary critic Les Esslin on the "empty figure on the empty stage" in Beckett’s theatre, French philosopher and psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle on women and sacrifice, Professor Elisabeth Angel-Perez on Trauma Drama in contemporary British theatre and Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s Mental Space Theory, I look at how such plays renew the forms of a "psychiatric realism" on the contemporary British stage (Christina Wald). By exploring the mind and psyche as they constitute a major terrain of investigation at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as shown by the development of neuroscience and cognitive science, these theatres of the mental space reflect on urgent philosophical, ethical and societal questions on subjectivity and the self around the idea that "part of modern identity is to live inside our heads" (Crimp).

This article explores the enthusiastic reception by gay, lesbian, and mainstream audiences of a German Holocaust document, Erica Fischer’s Aimée & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 (1994), in the context of the emergence of increasingly global gay and lesbian movements in the 1990s. Aimée & Jaguar invited collective identification as victims by tapping into the contemporary gay/lesbian discourse that used the Holocaust as a metaphor for the plight of homosexuals, further resonating with a series of AIDS dramas from the era that did the same. The text’s reception and selective (dis)identification by Fischer and audiences alike raise questions about the ownership and appropriation of Holocaust memory as well as about the impact of globalizing social movements and mass media on post-Holocaust identity politics.

À la croisée de la littérature, de l’analyse du discours, de la psychanalyse, de la psychologie et des théories sur le trauma, Écrire les Blessures de l’enfance. Inscription du trauma dans la littérature contemporaine au féminin explore l’inscription textuelle des traumas de l’enfance à travers l’étude d’œuvres  autobiographiques et autofictionnelles d’auteures reconnues telles que Chantal Chawaf, Chloé Delaume, Marguerite Duras, Marie Nimier au côté de nouvelles voix comme Béatrice de Jurquet et Colette Mainguy. Vers quelles stratégies textuelles et quels procédés littéraires se tourner pour témoigner de la nature obsessionnelle du trauma? Le passage à l’écriture et à la remémoration des souvenirs permet-il à l’écrivaine de sortir de l’impasse mentale causée par l'événement traumatique? Cet ouvrage examine différentes représentations du trauma et propose de nouvelles perspectives ainsi que des réponses et des réflexions sur cet aspect de l’écriture des femmes qui s'avère être un espace propice pour révéler des histoires de honte, de culpabilité et de violence.

Entre dos silencis (1958) és, segurament, la novel•la més remarcable d’Aurora Bertrana després del seu retorn de l’exili. Els motius en són diversos, tot i que destacaríem el fet que l’argument narra les conseqüències devastadores de la Segona Guerra Mundial a Etobon, un petit poble francès en què tots els homes van ser afusellats a ran de l’ocupació nazi l’any 1944.
La novel•la està basada en fets reals i inspirada en les vivències de l’autora durant la missió humanitària que va portar a terme en aquell mateix poble. Així, aquest treball analitza les estratègies narratives que Aurora Bertrana desenvolupa en Entre dos silencis per plasmar el context de barbàrie, repressió i trauma, individual i social, amb què es va trobar en arribar al petit poble de l’Haute Saône. L’estudi argumenta el treball de dol com a procés d’elaboració i integració de la realitat d’una pèrdua o d’un xoc traumàtic; aquest serà el mecanisme mitjançant el qual l’autora s’alliberarà del pes dels fantasmes dels morts perquè, com ella mateixa va afirmar, res ni ningú no tenia el poder d’esborrar-li’ls de la memòria.

In her book-length works i is a long memoried woman and “Picasso, I Want My Face Back,” the Guyanese-British poet Grace Nichols uses poetry to give a voice to a particular woman in history. The lyrical subjects speaking in these works, an unnamed enslaved woman and the artist Dora Maar, respectively, bear witness to the past injustices they have endured. Through close reading, I show that both testimonial accounts address not only the historical violence suffered by these women but also the epistemic violence perpetrated by a modernist representation of them in writing and in painting. This epistemic violence presents them as non-agents, in crisis and as victims. I explore what it means that at the heart of Nichols’ two testimonial projects lies an ethics of agency which not only seeks to make these particular women’s voices heard, but which also presents a mode of writing that favors a particular narrative identity.

This essay identifies a particular mode of testimonial writing, ‘hybrid testimony’, which is produced through creative collaborations between victims of historical violence and professional writers. Through analysis of two autobiographical responses to the civil wars in Sudan —  Slave: The True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and Her Fight for Survival (2004), by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis, and What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006) by Dave Eggers — it considers whether hybrid testimony should be considered a distinct genre in its own right, reflecting on the cultural, historical and political forces that determine the ways that this literature is written and read.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF
-- TOC and book summary in downloadable .pdf] 
According to the poet Elias Canetti, "All the things one has forgotten / scream for help in dreams." To the ancient Egyptians they were prophecies, and in world folklore they have often marked visitations from the dead. For Freud they were expressions of "wish fulfillment," and for Jung, symbolic representations of mythical archetypes. Although there is still much disagreement about the significance and function of dreams, they seem to serve as a barometer of current mind and body states.

In this volume, Deirdre Barrett brings together the study of dreams and the psychology of trauma. She has called on a distinguished group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers--among them Rosalind Cartwright, Robert J. Lifton, and Oliver Sacks--to consider how trauma shapes dreaming and what the dreaming mind might reveal about trauma. The book focuses on catastrophic events, such as combat, political torture, natural disasters, and rape. The lasting effects of childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse or severe burns, on personality formation, the nature of memories of early trauma, and the development of defenses related to amnesia and dissociation are all considered. The book also takes up trauma and adult dreams, including Vietnam veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, rape victims, and firestorm survivors. Finally, this volume concludes with a look at the potential "traumas of normal life," such as divorce, bereavement, and life-threatening illness, and the role of dreams in working through normal grief and loss.

Taken together, these diverse perspectives illuminate the universal and the particular effects of traumatic experience. For physicians and clinicians, determining the etiology of nightmares offers valuable diagnostic and therapeutic insights for individual treatment. This book provides a way of juxtaposing the research in the separate fields of trauma and dreams, and learning from their discoveries.

Literature is a consequential medium that refl ects human phenomena through artistic mode. It helps in recalling past traumatic experiences though more oft en in a masked form. Th e memories of the bellicose confl icts are recounted by the victims long aft er the harrowing events get safely buried in history and no longer accessible to the present. People conventionally forget the source of the trauma yet they recollect it through literary betokens like poems, musical compositions, plays, novels, stories, etc. Th e literary texts play a vital role in recalling and understanding a particular confl ict through the wounded psyche which no historical or any other narratives can reach as effi caciously. Th is is one of the main reasons why literary discourses rather than historical narratives are comparatively more effi cacious in portraying confl icts. Th is manuscript highlights what literature tells us about a particular confl ict that social science literature has missed on. It additionally accentuates how literary discourses of select women writers from Northeast India proved to be more reliable representations of confl icts because they endeavor to capture the unknowable and inexpressible far more effi caciously through tropes and images. Th e manuscript is unique in the sense that it attempts to establish a periscopic understanding of identity, confl ict, and trauma within literary prisms and for this, the manuscript

The long-awaited extensively revised and expanded version of Mogenson's provocative earlier book, God Is a Trauma: Vicarious Religion and Soul-Making. Despite is title, this book is not about theology. When a psychologist writes about God, he must do so within the confines of his own field of inquiry, the psyche. Mogenson's aim is to focus attention on the religion dimension of the psychology of those overwhelming events we describe as traumatic. Whether a divine being really exists or not, the psychological fact remains that we tend to experience traumatic events as if they were in some sense divine.

In his 2008 selection of poems András Visky unified his biographical trauma (of being departed to the Romanian Gulag in the age of 2) and the traumatic "event" of faith in the sense of the derridian "secret". Just like the secret of Abraham walking up to the Moria, the event is born in the decentralising act of prayer and simultanously turns our attention to the aporia of faith and of language.

Akár a Mória hegyére baktató Ábrahám esetében, az esemény az ént decentralizáló ima pozíciójában születik meg, és egyszerre fordítja tekintetünket a hit és a nyelv apóriái felé.

“Is the Holocaust Western?” Such a question is posed by Jeffrey Alexander in his work, The Meanings of Social Life where he also acknowledges that, in other parts of the world, the Holocaust is not a common reference of WWII (83). In Southeast Asia, for example, Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Japanese occupation might be the more prominent traumatic references evoked. However, during WWII, in U.S.-occupied Philippines, a specific group of people have experienced both Nazism and the Japanese Occupation: the Manilaners – a hybridised Filipino-German word, which, on the outset, would signify these thousands of European Jews who have escaped Nazism to settle in Manila.

Memoirs of these survivors have been compiled in two works which I analyse at present: Frank Ephraim’s Escape to Manila and Juergen Goldhagen’s Manila Memories. The fact that both memoirs recount two traumatic events– the Holocaust and colonial domination – and combine “trauma dramas” of East and West, constitute an interesting area of study because these stories show how each community’s referential traumas become bridges of empathy and responsibility toward the other at a time when there was not yet even a consideration of the Holocaust as a paradigm of WWII trauma.

I thus delineate this paper in three points: firstly, then-Philippine President Manuel Quezon’s decision to accept Jewish European refugees inscribes itself, not only as postcolonial resistance to the then-U.S. administration, it also portrays the Filipinos’ “vicarious responsibility for the other's afflictions” (Alexander). Secondly, such narratives offer, not a “competitive memory” of victimisation (Rothberg) which promotes either an Asian or European version of WWII, rather, hybridised, displaced and re-interpreted memories of both the Holocaust and Japanese intervention. Lastly, the name these refugees have given themselves, Manilaner, thus conceptualises hybrid, cross-cultural and multidirectional post/memories of World War II.

By Joy Ernst and Tina Maschi
Elder abuse is a global systemic problem in which one or more
traumatic or stressful life experiences directly affect older
adults, their families, and communities. Despite its devastating
impact, the understanding of—and response to—elder abuse
has rarely been explored through a trauma-informed lens.
Despite the prevalence of traumatic and stressful life experiences,
research and practice are just beginning to target the
intersection of elder abuse and life course trauma. This article
demonstrates how knowledge about the causes, consequences,
and responses to elder abuse can be integrated
with the principles of trauma-informed care to improve agency
and community responses to preventing or intervening with
elder abuse and neglect. In order to address the ongoing
problems with detection and treatment of elder abuse, we
assert that instilling trauma and elder abuse informed care in
organizational services and policies forms a synergistic alliance
and would address many of these concerns.

"http://rhr.dukejournals.org/content/2011/111/184.full.pdf+html


The 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States has become one of the most represented disasters in history since it produced an unprecedented visual impact on those around the world who watched the second plane crash into the South Tower live on television. In an atmosphere in which reality resembled fiction, fiction was initially rejected as a suitable means for understanding and relating to the enormity of the events because it apparently had nothing to offer that journalism and the news could not provide. Ten years later, these initial misgivings have been overcome and 9/11 fiction has become a genre in itself. This essay explores the use of newspaper articles, radio transcripts, phone messages, e-mails, and interviews with eyewitnesses in Frédéric Beigbeder's Windows on the World (2004); the use of moving images—a flip book—and other visuals inserted in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005); and the references to well-known photographs of 9/11 in Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007). These authors do not ignore the mediated nature of 9/11 but display it through the incorporation of other media in their fiction, which renders their representation of the trauma more effective."

Trauma Studies Anthology is out from Wydawnictwo Universitas. It contains  essays by Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys, Dominick LaCapra, Henry Bond, Geoffrey Hartman, Joshua Hirsch, Stef Craps etc. translated into Polish with my introduction. Below the blurb in Polish:

Pojęcie traumy upowszechniło się jako narzędzie opisu w psychoterapii, literaturoznawstwie, kulturoznawstwie, historiografii, badaniach nad wizualnością oraz Zagładą. Ponadto pewne
przejawy traumy stały się kapitałem kulturowym, podstawą tożsamości czy też powodem do dumy. Niniejszy tom przedstawia wybrane aspekty pola dociekań – nazywanego studiami nad traumą lub też teorią traumy – w kontekście anglo-amerykańskim. Wyróżniono następujące obszary tematyczne: psychoanalityczne odczytania traumy, trauma w obrazach fotograficznych i filmowych, krytyka reprezentacji literackich i kulturowych oraz konteksty krytyczne (postkolonializm i biopolityka). Znalazły się tutaj zarówno nowe odczytania tekstów tradycyjnego kanonu za pomocą narzędzi dekonstrukcjonistycznych, jak i analizy przedstawień wizualnych, a także próby przeformułowania założeń tej koncepcji w celu badania kultur niezachodnich lub pomijanych aspektów traumatyzacji w euroamerykańskiej nowoczesności.

Spis treści:
Tomasz Łysak, „Trauma – od genealogii pojęcia do studiów nad traumą”.
Cathy Caruth, „Traumatyczne przebudzenia (Freud, Lacan i etyka pamięci)”, przeł. Katarzyna Bojarska.
Dominick LaCapra, „Trauma, nieobecność, utrata”, przeł. Katarzyna Bojarska.
Ruth Leys, „Freud i trauma”, przeł. Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska.
Bessel A. van der Kolk i Onno van der Hart, „Natrętna przeszłość: elastyczność  pamięci i piętno traumy”, przeł. Tomasz Bilczewski i Anna Kowalcze Pawlik.
Ulrich Baer, „Ku spojrzeniu demokrytejskiemu”, przeł. Katarzyna Bojarska.
Henry Bond, „Twardy dowód”, przeł. Jan Burzyński.
Joshua Hirsch, „Postmodernizm, drugie pokolenie i międzykulturowe kino  posttraumatyczne”, przeł. Tomasz Bilczewski i Anna Kowalcze Pawlik.
Adam Lowenstein, „Moment alegoryczny”, przeł. Jan Burzyński.
Mark Seltzer, „Kultura rany”, przeł. Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska.
Leigh Gilmore, „Przypadki graniczne: trauma, autoreprezentacja i prawne porządki tożsamości”, przeł. Jan Burzyński.
Geoffrey H. Hartman, „Wiedza traumatyczna a badania literackie”, przeł. Jan Burzyński.
Stef Craps, „Poza eurocentryzmem. Teoria traumy w epoce globalizacji”, przeł. Jan Burzyński.
Peter Vermuelen, „Biopolityka traumy”, przeł. Jan Burzyński.

A controversial characteristic in F. H. Batacan’sSmaller and Smaller Circles is the humanization of its antagonist, Alejandro Benitez-Carlos Jr. (also known as Alex). In the story, he was a cruel serial killer who dehumanizes the bodies of his young victims. However, he was not born this way; his parents knew him before as a good child. In fact, his crimes are because of his tragic past as a product of sexual abuse. This paper will analyze Alex Carlos's development into a serial killer through Lacanian psychoanalysis.  This is because of the prominent presence of loss/lack in the work (e.g. life, dignity). First, his peaceful life in early childhood will be explored as a representation of the Imaginary Order. Next, the abuse will be analyzed as the cause of his entrance to the Symbolic Order, where he has no control over his circumstances. Instead, it will be in the hands of the Other: his family, classmates, and especially his P.E. teacher. After being scarred by the Other, killing boys will be his unsuccessful way of pursuing his objet petit a: a life without trauma.

Remarked from her very first book, Voica (published in 1924), and up to her last novel Le Témoin de l’éternité, printed first in France in 1975 and translated into Romanian in 1995, Henriette Yvonne Stahl turned from a promising female writer into a unique voice in the inter-and post-war literary life in Romania.
Starting from Rimbaud’s illuminating pensée “Love has to be reinvented” (Felman 2007: 5), this paper aims to explore the identity of females in My Brother, the Man, drawing on identity and trauma as devised by Penny Brown (1992), Cathy Caruth (1995 and 1996), Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992). In addition, the mixture of memory and narrative covers types of talk fiction (Kakandes 2005), the shift of focus from the subject of remembrance to the mode it takes place (Anne Whitehead 2009), and Beata Piątek who looks at how narratives impact readers (2014). Are the main characters engulfed in a dense life texture able to explore their personal dilemmas, difficult choices and detach from the flux of their own passions and desires? Or are they going to fall victims to their own inability of understanding the meaning of life, paralleled by the lack of vision and humanity manifested by secondary characters? Both male and female characters display a dominant profile, their actions and inner voices are marked by subtle or abrupt shifts, meant to stimulate a noticeable response from those they love or hate. The omniscient narrator employs a vast repertoire of techniques, meant to nuance egos and changes, moving from a classically-structured narrative to a detective story supporting inner monologues and deepened psychological impasses, occasionally bringing fictional personae closer to realist and existentialist fiction.