Academic literature on the topic 'Cathy Caruth'

This article sheds light on the concept of “trauma” present in some passages of the works of Dominick LaCapra and Cathy Caruth, and their debts with Sigmund Freud’s conceptions. It also examines the specific proposals of the Viennese intellectual, which can help avoid a purely descriptive use of that concept. Special attention has been paid to the way these authors conceive memory and time, and to potential uses of the concept of trauma for some historical cases.Key WordsTrauma, repression, literality, nachträglich, economic perspective.ResumenEl presente artículo examina el concepto de “trauma” presente en algunos pasajes de las obras de Dominick LaCapra y Cathy Caruth, así como sus deudas con las concepciones de Sigmund Freud. También se estudia las propuestas específicas del intelectual vienés, que pueden a ayudar a evitar un uso puramente descriptivo de dicho concepto. Se ha prestado especial atención al modo en dichos autores conciben la memoria y la temporalidad, y a algunos usos potenciales del concepto de trauma para ciertos casos históricos.Palabras clavesTrauma, represión, literalidad, nachträglich, perspectiva económica.

O artigo aborda o papel da afinidade e empatia na cotradução para o português brasileiro de Dzieciństwo w pasiakach (1969), de Bogdan Bartnikowski para a editora do Museu Auschwitz-Birkenau (Infância listrada, 2018), realizada em parceria com o Prof. Dr. Gabriel Borowski (Universidade Jaguelônica, Cracóvia, Polônia). Na obra em episódios, Bartnikowski (Varsóvia, Polônia, 1932) narra sua experiência, ainda criança, no campo de concentração de Auschwitz. A estrutura de transmissão traumática de pós-memória (Marianne Hirsch) é aqui utilizada, bem como os estudos de Trauma Cultural (Jeffrey Alexander), desdobramento multidisciplinar a partir do conceito de trauma nos Estudos da Cultura (Cathy Caruth).

This article addresses a noteworthy development in French women's autobiographical texts of the extreme contemporary: the painful writing of mourning subsequent to the traumatic death of a child. Trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth, Susan Brison, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub insist on the importance of the narration of the traumatic experience in the form of a 'meaningful [...] story' (Caruth, 1996: 117) enabling the object of the trauma to become the subject of her own story, and thus effecting a transformation of her status from passive victim to agential subject. If, however, trauma is beyond words and 'unspeakable' (in both senses of the adjective), how can one find the adequate discursive means to represent it, how can one transform the traumatic experience into a narrative? Drawing on theories of trauma and mourning, the article analyzes the ways in which two contemporary French writers, Laure Adler and Camille Laurens, deal with this daunting discursive dilemma, following the passing of their respective infants. Using various textual strategies, Adler and Laurens both succeed in narrating poignant accounts of loss, producing in each case a 'livre-tombeau' which is simultaneously a book of death and a book of life, allowing the deceased infant to live on through the writing of the trauma of mourning.

This article addresses new approaches to the novel in the twenty-first century. It begins with an affirmation that even the most avant-garde of contemporary critics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century share a commonality: a background in what was identified as “close reading” in the Anglo-American academic world and analyse de texte in French. After numerous declarations in recent decades about the death of the novel, the death of the author and the death of literary criticism, it is evident that the novel as a genre has survived, authors remain a subject of study, and new approaches are possible. The study of trauma in fiction (as introduced by Cathy Caruth and David Aberbach), as well as eco-criticism, are promising new points of departure. The required close reading implied by Twitter also opens up new possibilities.

The emergence of trauma study with the publication of Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History have gained significant interest in analyzing traumatic experiences in literary works. Literary trauma is seen as the media and alternative to read the wound and trauma through narration and fiction in the form of an anxiety plot. This study aims to analyze the traumatic experiences in Eka Kurniawan's novel entitled Seperti Dendam, Rindu Harus Dibayar Tuntas. This research is descriptive qualitative in nature. The objects of this research are the traumatic events and experiences in Kurniawan's novel. The data were collected by note taking and highlighting the relevant traumatic event and analyzed using the concept of trauma and memory of Cathy Caruth. The result shows that the characters in this novel respond to trauma differently such as having intrusive thoughts, re-experiencing the trauma through flashbacks and dreams, avoidance, and having negative feelings and moods. The novel shows that the socio-cultural environment can become the greatest source of trauma as well as offer the healing process for the traumatized through compassion and understanding. The characters' traumatic experience is narrated by the unknown godlike narrator. Through the portrayal of the characters, Kurniawan reveals how pain, suffering, and traumatic experiences lead the characters to gain high self-esteem, self-knowledge, and philosophical understanding of social reality.

This paper applies trauma theory to Hemingway’s post World War I writing. His work, for example, A Farewell to Arms, shows how soldiers are traumatized by their war experiences, and how they suffer from such aftereffects as flashbacks, nightmares, inability to sleep and social maladjustment. Although examining Hemingway’s work in terms of shell-shock has been established, this paper suggests that traumatized characters in Hemingway's work carry what the trauma theorist Cathy Caruth calls an “impossible history.” It suggests that survivors of trauma experience a sudden or catastrophic event that is beyond the normal realm of human experience. Since traumatized individuals often do not process catastrophic events as other normal events, they have access to it through disturbing flashbacks and nightmares. These psychological manifestations provide snippets of the individuals’ impossible history which they never fully possess or normally store. By tracing these psychological manifestations, e.g., flashbacks and nightmares, this paper shows that traumatized survivors struggle with a traumatic history, haunting them in day and night.

The type of horror film known as “found footage” was prominent in the 2000s and early 2010s. The term refers to films that aim to scare their audience, and which are primarily shot diegetically, with handheld and surveillance cameras that exist within the world of the film. The thesis identifies conceptual, aesthetic, and thematic links between found footage horror films and psychological trauma theory. For example, in each film the premise of the characters and viewers finding footage of a frightening event evokes the victim’s belated recollection of a traumatic experience. Additionally, the often-frantic cinematography and ambiguous formulation of the monster evokes the shocked and disoriented cognition of the trauma victim in the wake of their experience. Finally, the experience and effect of trauma on society is a recurring theme of found footage horror films. By examining 14 films, this thesis aims to answer the question: how do found footage horror films represent the relationship between individual and collective trauma? It theorises that individual trauma is conveyed through the films’ point-of-view (POV) aesthetic, while collective trauma is conveyed through their narrative themes. The thesis groups the films into four categories, each of which addresses a different aspect of trauma theory. Firstly, Remote found footage horror films, such as The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez 1999), are examined as depictions of national historical traumas. Secondly, Urban found footage horror films, such as Cloverfield (Reeves 2008), are read as depictions of contemporary global traumas. Thirdly, Domestic found footage horror films, such as Paranormal Activity (Peli 2009), are framed as depictions of systemic domestic trauma. Fourthly, Perpetrator found footage horror films, such as Man Bites Dog (Belvaux, Bonzel and Poelvoorde 1992), are examined as depictions of perpetrator trauma. The thesis disputes the claim made by numerous critics and theorists that found footage horror films do not constitute a subgenre, but merely a cinematographic style or marketing gimmick. By demonstrating their aesthetic and thematic consistency, and the manifold ways that found footage horror can be read as representing trauma, the thesis argues that the films constitute a specific subgenre of horror cinema. The thesis makes significant contributions to knowledge by identifying, testing and demonstrating links between horror film theory, genre theory, spectator theory, and psychological and collective trauma theory. It conducts a broad survey of a recent subgenre of horror films that has, thus far, only received sporadic and insubstantial academic attention. It also presents an original theory that explains the psychological and sociological subtext of the subgenre, and the cultural insights that the films provide.
Doctor of Philosophy

L’œuvre de McCarthy est imprégnée de violence. Fil conducteur de l’œuvre dans sa totalité. L’œuvre est une re-présentation en miniature de l’Histoire américaine. Une transcription artistique d’un quotidien écrasant, pesant lourd sur les personnages emblématiques. Oeuvre en délire. Nature tourmentée. Texte mobile, mouvant, d’où l’aspect baroque sur le plan stylistique. Style qui épouse les formes d’un paysage convulsionné, torturé ; style apocalyptique, style qui ranime et qui insuffle la vie à une nature décrépite et dilapidée. Style visuel métaphorique. Style qui dépeint la violence pour mieux la dénoncer. Personnages qui semblent sortir du règne humain et tendre vers le minéral, le végétal ou l’animal. Personnages inscrits dans une dynamique d’échanges avec le cosmos propre au corps grotesque. C’est au lecteur d’établir la logique du sens. Violence de l’univers décrit mais aussi violence faite au langage et génératrice de langage. Esthétique de la violence et par la violence
McCarthy’s fiction is embedded with violence. McCarthy’s fiction is a re-presentation of American History. An artistic transcription of a daily life weighing heavily on emblematic characters. Tormented nature. Frantic fiction. Moving text, hence, stylistically, the baroque aspect. Style that takes on the form of a tortured, convulsed landscape ; apocalyptic style. Style that gives life to a decrepit and dilapidated nature. Visual and metaphoric style. Style that depicts violence to denounce it even more. Characters that seem to get out of the human kingdom to tend towards the mineral, the vegetal or the animal. Characters that are inscribed in a dynamics proper to the grotesque. The reader is compelled to build up meaning, to set up the logic of meaning. Violence of the universe being described but also violence made out of language and productive of language. Aesthetics of and by means of violence

Al Qaeda killings, posttraumatic stress, and the Gothic together triangulate a sizable space in recent American fiction that is still largely uncharted by critics. This thesis maps that shared territory in four novels written between 2005 and 2007 by writers who were born in America, and whose protagonists are the survivors in New York City after the World Trade Center falls. Published in the city of their tragedy and reviewed in its media, the novels surveyed here include Don DeLillo’s _Falling Man_ (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer’s _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_ (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s _The Writing on the Wall_ (2005), and Jess Walter’s _The Zero_ (2006). The thesis issues a challenge to the large number of negative and dismissive reviews of the novels under consideration, making a case that under different criteria, shaped by trauma theory and psychoanalysis, the novels succeed after all in making readers feel what it was to be alive in September 2001, enduring the posttraumatic stress for months and years later. The thesis asserts that 9/11 fiction is too commonly presented in popular journals and scholarly studies as an undifferentiated mass. In the same critical piece a journalist or an academic may evaluate narratives in which unfold a terrorist's point of view, a surviving or a dying New York City victim's perspective, and an outsider's reaction set thousands of miles away from Ground Zero. What this thesis argues for is a separation in study of the fictive strands that meditate on the burning towers, treating the New York City survivor story as a discrete body. Despite their being set in one of the most known cities of the Western world, and the terrorist attack that they depict being the most- watched catastrophe ever experienced in real-time before, these fictions have not yet been critically ordered. Charting the salient reappearing conflicts, unsettling descriptions, protagonist decay, and potent techniques for registering horror that resurface in this New York City 9/11 fiction, this thesis proposes and demonstrates how the peculiar and affecting Gothic tensions in the works can be further understood by trauma theory, a term coined by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996: 72). Though the thesis concentrates on developments in trauma theory from the mid 1990s to 2015, it also addresses its theoretical antecedents: from the earliest voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked mental illness to a trauma (Charcot, Janet, Breuer, Freud), to researchers from mid-twentieth century (Adler, Lindemann) who studied how catastrophe affects civilian minds not previously trained to either fight war or withstand cataclysm. Always keeping at the fore the ancient Greek double-meaning of trauma as both unhealing “wound” and “defeat,” the thesis surveys tenets of the trauma theorists from the very first of those who studied the effects on civilian survivors of disaster (of what is still the largest nightclub fire in U.S. history, which replaced front page coverage of World War II for a few days: the Cocoanut Grove blaze in Boston, 1942) up to those theorists writing in 2015. The concepts evolving behind trauma theory, this thesis demonstrates, provide a useful mechanism to discuss the surprising yearnings hiding behind the appearance of doppelgängers, possession ghosts, terrorists as monsters, empty coffins, and visitants that appear to feed on characters’ sorrow, guilt, and loneliness within the novels under discussion. This thesis reappraises the dominant idea in trauma studies of the mid-1990s, namely that trauma victims often cannot fully remember and articulate their physical and psychic wounds. The argument here is that, true to the theories of the Caruthian school, the victims in these novels may not remember and express their trauma completely and in a linear fashion. However, the victims figured in these novels do relate the horrors of their memory to a degree by letting their narration erupt with the unexpectedly Gothic images, tropes, visions, language, and typical contradictions, aporias, lacunae, and paradoxes. The Gothic, one might say, becomes the language in which trauma speaks and articulates itself, albeit not always in the most cogent of signs. One might easily dismiss these fleeting Gothic presences that characters conjure in the fictions under consideration as anomalous apparitions signalling nothing. However, this thesis interrogates these ghostly traces of Gothicism to find what secrets they hold. Working from the insights of psychoanalysis and its post-Freudian re-inventers and challengers, it aims to puzzle out the dimensions of characters’ mourning in its “traumagothic” reading of the texts. Characters’ use of the Gothic becomes their way of remembering, a coded language to the curious. This thesis holds that unexpressed grief and guilt are the large constant in this grouping of novels. Characters’ grief articulation and guilt release, or the desire for symbolic amnesia, take paths that the figures often were suspicious of before 9/11: a return to organized religion, a belief in spirits, a call for vengeance, psychotherapy, substance abuse, splitting with a partner, rampant sex with nearby strangers, torture of suspects, and killing. All the earnest attempts through the above means by the characters to express grief, vent rage, and alleviate survivor guilt do so without noticeable success. True closure towards their trauma is largely a myth. No reliable evidence surfaces from the close reading of the texts that those affected by trauma ever fully recover. However, as this thesis demonstrates, other forms of recompense come from these searches for elusive peace and the nostalgic longing for the America that has been lost to them.

Qu'y a-t-il de commun entre Vladimir Nabokov, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy et James Ellroy ? Ces cinq écrivains contemporains se sont intéressés au personnage du criminel asocial sur le territoire des États-Unis. Son existence repose sur le paradoxe propre à tout individu asocial : bien qu'il n'adhère pas aux conventions établies qu'il perçoit comme des entraves, il ne souhaite pas rompre les ponts avec la collectivité et refuse la vie en autarcie. S'il n'est donc pas antisocial, pourquoi fait-il le choix de l'asocialité ? Parce qu'il ne peut accepter ce qu'il perçoit comme des déviances dans le modèle de vie qui lui est proposé et qu'il va le remettre en question. Mais pourquoi serait-il de plus enclin à la criminalité ? La question est légitime dans la mesure où la relation entre criminalité et asociabilité n'est pas évidente alors que lier antisocial et criminel serait plus aisé car il y alors négation affirmée des lois de la société et volonté de s'en affranchir par l'action. A l'inverse, un asocial n'est pas nécessairement criminel. Cependant, chez les protagonistes des auteurs, ces deux caractéristiques vont de pair : peut-être sont-ils à la fois asociaux et criminels parce qu'ils ont décidé de vivre leur transgression en marge d'une société qui ne les satisfait pas mais qui ne les intéresse pas assez pour qu'il la combatte activement ? Ou peut-être trouvent-ils nécessaire de s'affranchir des lois pour exister dans le cadre qui leur est imposé et qu'ils ne cautionnent plus ? Il en résulte une écriture façonnée par ces questionnements et leurs nombreuses variations. Le corpus fait de biographies, récits fictionnels et non-fictionnels, entraîne une réflexion sur le modèle sociétal américain des années 50 à la fin des années 90 et plus particulièrement sur ses dysfonctionnements à l'origine de l'émergence de ce type de personnage qui devient alors l'instrument à visée démonstrative d'une littérature engagée.

Aiming to make an intervention in both emerging Slow Cinema and classical Trauma Cinema scholarship, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the post-trauma cinema of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz merges aesthetics of cinematic slowness with narratives of post-trauma in his films Melancholia (2008), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) and Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012). Diaz has been repeatedly considered as representative of what Jonathan Romney termed in 2004 “Slow Cinema”. The director uses cinematic slowness for an alternative approach to an on-screen representation of post-trauma. Contrary to popular trauma cinema, Diaz’s portrait of individual and collective trauma focuses not on the instantenaeity but on the duration of trauma. In considering trauma as a condition and not as an event, Diaz challenges the standard aesthetical techniques used in contemporary Trauma Cinema, as highlighted by Janet Walker (2001, 2005), Susannah Radstone (2001), Roger Luckhurst (2008) and others. Diaz’s films focus instead on trauma’s latency period, the depletion of a survivor’s resources, and a character’s slow psychological breakdown. Slow Cinema scholarship has so far focused largely on the films’ aesthetics and their alleged opposition to mainstream cinema. Little work has been done in connecting the films’ form to their content. Furthermore, Trauma Cinema scholarship, as trauma films themselves, has been based on the immediate and most radical signs of post-trauma, which are characterised by instantaneity; flashbacks, sudden fears of death and sensorial overstimulation. Following Lutz Koepnick’s argument that slowness offers “intriguing perspectives” (Koepnick, 2014: 191) on how trauma can be represented in art, this thesis seeks to consider the equally important aspects of trauma duration, trauma’s latency period and the slow development of characteristic symptoms. With the present work, I expand on current notions of Trauma Cinema, which places emphasis on speed and the unpredictability of intrusive memories. Furthermore, I aim to broaden the area of Slow Cinema studies, which has so far been largely focused on the films’ respective aesthetics, by bridging form and content of the films under investigation. Rather than seeing Diaz’s slow films in isolation as a phenomenon of Slow Cinema, I seek to connect them to the existing scholarship of Trauma Cinema studies, thereby opening up a reading of his films.

The hallmark of the three novels forming Nuruddin Farah’s trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship is the fact that they share several tales of recurrent symbolic departure and return. This cyclical nature of Farah’s narrative foregrounds the collective traumatic past that Farah’s narrative embodies. In three chapters, the trilogy is analysed in the light of the writings of some Trauma Studies theorists such as Anne Whitehead, Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, and Dominick LaCapra. The first chapter examines the theoretical foundation of reading trauma in Farah’s narrative. Even though the chapter relies on trauma theory that is exclusively influenced by Western traumas, it seeks to adapt this theory to the understanding of a non-Western collective trauma experience. Moreover, an emphasis is placed on deploying psychoanalytical and historical writings on trauma to achieve an understanding of its literary aspect rather than using fiction to develop the pre-existing psychoanalytical and historical readings of trauma. Chapter Two, on the other hand, provides an application of the theoretical views presented in the preceding chapter. The second chapter explores the deployment of two particular literary devices – intertextuality and repetition – in the context of trauma narrative and how they re-create trauma in their own distinct way. Chapter Three focuses primarily on Farah’s characters and their problematic relationship with both the perception of time and memory-keeping. The chapter emphasizes that there is a complete identification between the teller of the memory and the memory told. This reading of Sweet and Sour Milk, Sardines and Close Sesame detangles the tension arising from the narrativisation of trauma from one end and the elements which engage in narrating it (language and characters) from the other.

The introduction offers several vignettes to mark the limits of Marx’s conceptualization of the slave, Agamben’s concept of the decision in states of emergency, and Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman’s unacknowledged connection to “European Man” as the image of thought producing their idea of trauma. Each vignette looks beyond these limits by turning to a different canonical work of Black thought. By staging these encounters between different theoretical traditions, the terms and presuppositions for a different understanding of trauma can commence. This introduction concludes with a call to return to the idea of the proletariat in Marxian and Marxist thought, precisely because it offers a more expansive approach for grappling with class exploitation and political disfranchisement than the concept of the working class, as the following notebooks will demonstrate.