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Journal articles on the topic 'Literary trauma theory'
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1
Berger, James, Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Kali Tal. "Trauma and Literary Theory." Contemporary Literature 38, no. 3 (1997): 569. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1208980.
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Shaker, Mary. "Trauma Theory and Literary Criticism." مجلة کلیة الآداب . حلوان 54, no. 1 (January 1, 2022): 1–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.21608/kgef.2022.266846.
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Toremans, Tom. "Trauma: Theory – Reading (and) Literary Theory in the Wake of Trauma." European Journal of English Studies 7, no. 3 (December 2003): 333–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1076/ejes.7.3.333.27981.
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Visser, Irene. "Trauma theory and postcolonial literary studies." Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47, no. 3 (July 2011): 270–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.569378.
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Pederson, Joshua. "Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory." Narrative 22, no. 3 (2014): 333–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nar.2014.0018.
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Yoo, Hyun-Joo. "Telling Trauma: Studies in Trauma Theories." Institute of British and American Studies 10, no. 1 (June 30, 2022): 59–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.25093/ibas.2022.55.59.
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Most literary trauma scholars have depended exclusively on the psychological theory of trauma, which was developed by Freud, and have interpreted trauma, from a homogenous and one-dimensional perspective, as unrepresentable, inherently pathological, timeless, repetitious, unknowable, and unspeakable. This traditional interpretation has served as a dominant, popular model of trauma. However, expanding beyond traditional, essentialist concepts of identity, experience, and remembering, trauma scholars are producing alternative, pluralistic theories of trauma. Given this, this paper first will introduce the traditional psychological model of trauma. To deepen and enrich the discussion of trauma beyond that of the disease-driven paradigm based on pathological essentialism, it will also introduce more recent, detailed, and sophisticated trauma theories. This study is expected to help us better understand the multifaceted functions and effects of traumatic experiences occurring at both the personal and the societal levels.
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Gu, Qiushi. "Trauma, Haunting, and Representation: Rereading and the Translation Examination of Kokoro." Journal of Language Teaching and Research 15, no. 1 (December 31, 2023): 263–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1501.29.
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The Japanese novel, Kokoro (1914), offers a profound insight into early 20th-century Japanese society encompassing history, politics, and literature. Although this novel has been extensively explored in literary and translation studies, the convergence remains underexplored. This study advocates integrating literary criticism with translation practice for a more faithful representation of narratives. Applying trauma/PTSD studies theory, it meticulously analyzes Kokoro, particularly examining the English and Chinese renditions of the pivotal term “談判 (danpan; negotiation)”. The methodology involves constructing a trilingual database, incorporating the Japanese source text and seven translations in English and Chinese. By scrutinizing specific passages, the study delves into trauma-related responses and behaviors, revealing their impact on long-lasting changes in personality and relationships. Emphasis is placed on the translation of key terms, preserving cultural and linguistic nuances. This innovative approach advances both literary criticism and translation theory, emphasizing psychological elements for a nuanced portrayal of characters’ states of mind. The study underscores the significance of trauma narratives in comprehending personal and historical traumas, asserting that translators of trauma literature must blend theoretical knowledge with social responsibility. They serve as “secondary witnesses,” entrusted with accurately transmitting traumatic stories between languages, fostering empathy, and preventing the repetition of tragedies in history. This approach provides an innovative interpretation of Kokoro and its translations, bridging the realms of literary criticism and translation studies.
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Al-Douri, Hamdi Hameed, and Shaymaa Saber Abdul-Aziz. "Reflections of Postcolonial Trauma in Lisa Ko’s The Leavers." Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities 30, no. 8, 2 (August 31, 2023): 27–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.25130/jtuh.30.8.2.2023.22.
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The term "trauma" is used to describe ambiguous and long-term harms. The study of psychological trauma has led to the creative representation of literary trauma. Even though the cultural trauma theory is increasingly criticized as being unsuitable for the research agenda of postcolonial studies, the diversity and expanding number of responses to it in postcolonial criticism show the theory's continued appeal. The key question in the discussion of trauma theory and postcolonial literary studies is still whether trauma theory can be successfully "postcolonized" in the sense of being usefully combined with postcolonial theory. Maybe this is one of the unique abilities of literary criticism: to develop the capacity to recognize connections that we were previously unaware of. The search shows the significance of finding closure to transcend past ordeals. The search is an analytical study of Lisa Ko’s novel Leavers. It gives a brief background to the novel and the novelist which displays in what way the novel tackles postcolonial trauma. The main two characters who suffer trauma show the possibility of trauma recovery by achieving their closures. The novel succeeds in depicting trauma and achieving recovery through the main character’s pursuit to find his closure. The study also demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of traumatic causatives, victims have significant symptoms, and their lives and destiny are contingent on their abilities to achieve closure.
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Becker, Mona, and C. Christina Sjöström. "Parallel Narratives: Trauma, Relationality, and Dissociation in Psychoanalysis and Realist Fiction." Humanities 13, no. 3 (May 1, 2024): 69. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h13030069.
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The reciprocal relationship between cultural trauma studies and psychoanalytic discourse on the one hand, and trauma studies and fictional representations of trauma on the other, has been commented on by scholars within the field of literary studies. What connects the representation of trauma in cultural trauma theory, trauma fiction, and psychoanalysis is that it is regarded as something that overwhelms an individual’s capacities for processing and functioning. However, while cultural trauma theory has come under scrutiny for prioritizing too narrow a view of trauma and its representations, the considerable critiques of and revisions to Freud’s theories, developed in the 1980/90s, have been mostly ignored by cultural trauma theorists. In this interdisciplinary article, we draw on relational psychoanalytic perspectives to demonstrate how relational revisions to psychoanalytic theory and techniques, as well as views on dissociation, can offer new perspectives for approaching literary works of fiction, such as the realist novel, which engage with the subject of trauma outside of established trauma conventions. We demonstrate that trauma novels by Lisa Appignanesi and Aminatta Forna parallel these revisions to psychoanalytic theory and techniques, allowing for a more pluralistic and nuanced representation of responses to trauma and suffering.
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Toroš, Ana. "Minority Literature and Collective Trauma: The Case of Slovene Triestine Literature." Treatises and Documents, Journal of Ethnic Studies / Razprave in Gradivo, Revija za narodnostna vprašanja 86, no. 86 (June 1, 2021): 65–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.36144/rig86.jun21.65-81.
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Abstract The study focuses on the relationship between minority literature and collective trauma. Drawing on the theory of trauma, psychoanalysis, memory studies, and literary representations of memory, we argue that the trauma resulting from the suppression of Slovene identity in Trieste during fascism is transmitted into literary discourse through two channels. Firstly, through the normative model of remembering the trauma in question – namely through literary works that can be described as fictions of memory. Secondly, we paid attention to the manifestations of trauma that (unconsciously) enter the narrative structure, regardless of the time and events, which are not necessarily tied to the period of fascism and to concrete events and places of memory. In this context, we illuminated the literary characters from the perspective of literary imagology (the I and the Other).
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Ogunyemi, Folabomi L. "Trauma and Empowerment in Tina McElroy Ansa’s Ugly Ways." Journal of Black Studies 52, no. 3 (January 11, 2021): 331–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021934720986424.
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Ugly Ways (1993) by Tina McElroy Ansa has been overlooked as a significant contribution to African American feminist literary fiction. This paper performs a close reading examining the novel’s thematic intersection of Black feminist theory and trauma theory. Part one of this essay defines Black feminist theory and outlines key concepts of Black feminist thought. Parts two and three focus on the protagonist, Esther “Mudear” Lovejoy, and analyze her “change” through the lenses of Black feminist theory and trauma theory, respectively, highlighting the ways in which Ugly Ways articulates a conception of Black womanhood defined in equal parts by empowerment and psychic pain. Part four argues that Black feminist theory and trauma theory are not just compatible, but consonant. Ultimately, Ugly Ways depicts African American women as complex human subjects and moves beyond conventional historical, literary, and popular representations.
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Berlant, Lauren. "Trauma i niewymowność." Teksty Drugie 3 (2018): 176–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.18318/td.2018.3.12.
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Bayer, Scott P. "Micah 1–3 and Cultural Trauma Theory: An Exploration." Open Theology 8, no. 1 (January 1, 2022): 492–502. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/opth-2022-0222.
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Abstract Trauma studies have seen rapid growth in popularity within the past two decades, moving from a psychological phenomenon to a concept utilized by literary critics, sociologists, and now biblical scholars. Yet, most of the work on trauma theory within biblical studies focuses on psychological aspects of trauma instead of sociological or cultural aspects of trauma. Drawing on Jeffery Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma, a cultural trauma reading of Micah 1–3 reveals how Micah 1–3 as a book transforms Micah’s localized psychological trauma to become a national trauma, explaining why scribes preserved Micah 1–3. Like holocaust testimony that became a cultural trauma, Micah’s testimony to his trauma became a trauma for all of Judea. To create a cultural trauma, Micah 1–3 define the trauma as divine punishment through an Assyrian invasion due to a breakdown of social order seen in the corrupt owners, rulers, and religious leaders. This cultural trauma then becomes one of the early texts to shape later biblical writers’ understanding of divine punishment. This article offers a different perspective of trauma theory and shows how cultural trauma theory explains why Micah 1–3 were preserved.
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Pokharel, Badri Prasad. "Trauma, Testimony and Anticipated Peace in Singh’s “The Silence of Violence”." Prithvi Academic Journal 3 (June 21, 2020): 47–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/paj.v3i0.29558.
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In the twenty-first century the trauma theory has become an important way to understand a wide variety of contemporary events of exhausting wars and conflicts which have battered the contemporary societies. In the most general sense, it is used to examine the ways in which past painful experiences are processed with the help of literary texts. It further attempts to analyze different ways by which traumatic occurrences are demonstrated, processed, exposed, and expressed throughout a variety of literary and historical texts as a form of testimony. Subsequently, the authors as well as the victims might attempt to negotiate and resolve their own personal traumas with the help of their writings and sometimes with the help of fictional characters in their literary texts as they serve to record and pronounce cultural traumas. In Padhmavati Singh’s “The Silence of Violence” which was written on the pretext of ten years violent conflict that took the lives of thousands of innocent people, one can find the characters and situation inextricably affected by trauma and she or he finds it hugely manipulated to bring out the post-conflict Nepali society apart from anticipating impatiently for long lasting peace and solidarity.
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Mason, Jessica Lowell. "Making Bedlam: Toward a Trauma-Informed Mad Feminist Literary Theory and Praxis." Humanities 12, no. 2 (March 9, 2023): 24. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h12020024.
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Building on what Margaret Price describes as the “long history of positive and person-centered discourses” of the term Mad, this article seeks to offer a (re)tooling and (re)theorization of the not-so-antiquated concept of “bedlam” as part of a Mad feminist literary theory and practice that aims to situate reading and writing practices on the subject of madness within a trauma-informed Mad framework and to (re)shape reading and writing practices by (re)seeing or seeing-in-a-new-and-old-Mad way the concept of “bedlam”—rendering it agential and unhinging it from its historical meanings. The article theorizes “bedlam” as a form of deliberate Mad literary practice, offering two examples of “bedlam-making”, one in the poetry of Anne Sexton’s 1960 collection To Bedlam and Part-way Back and the other in the historical fiction of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The article strives to re-articulate “bedlam” in a way that draws attention to the agency of language on the subject of madness, when written and read by writers and readers aware of the acute violences and traumas performed upon bodies exiled from “Reason”, attending to the ways in which writers and readers make a subjectivity of “bedlam” or a resistance to and critique of systemic oppression that gives social agency to Mad literary action. “Making bedlam”, it is argued in this essay, is a Mad feminist literary theory and practice, part of social justice discourses and liberation-focused action, which is deeply connected with other liberation movements in pursuit of the end of systemic violences.
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Hogeterp, Albert. "Trauma and Its Ancient Literary Representation: Mark 5,1–20." Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 111, no. 1 (April 1, 2020): 1–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/znw-2020-0001.
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AbstractThis article revisits Mark 5,1–20 from the perspective of trauma theory, in light of historical contexts of Gerasa’s collective trauma and the cultural contexts of ancient perceptions of demons and their exorcism. The interplay between individual and collective levels of the story sheds light on symbolic overtones of an unresolved trauma about Roman military presence in the country of the Gerasenes. The story represents this trauma through literary indirection, including not only the enigmatic relation between “Legion” and the drowning swine, but also the paradoxical contrasts between individual and collective requests to Jesus. Mark 5,1–20 evokes meanings not only as pre-Markan tradition, but also as Markan redaction which intersect in crucial ways with the prelude to Jerusalem’s destruction (68–70 C.E.).
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Pokharel, Badri Prasad. "Symbolical and Metaphorical Representation of People’s Movement and Quest for Peace in Dhakal’s “Mother and the Motherland”." Myagdi Guru 5, no. 1 (December 31, 2022): 68–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/mg.v5i1.70623.
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This article analyzes trauma in Narayan Dhakal’s “Mother and the Motherland” (Janani Janmabhumischha) by applying psychological aspects of trauma theory propagated by Cathy Caruth to study the symbolical references for the consequences of Second Movement (2006). But, it has tried to bring out the crucial facts of the Movement analyzing the symbolic and metaphoric aspects in the story. Trauma theory has been used to formalize the historical events which people after long span of time would have forgotten and the literary writing would be a testimony of this historical event. It has been used to focalize those events in the literary forms. The story as a piece of art has stood as a symbolical and metaphorical discourse to scrutinize the minor details that might have happened around two decades ago. Caruth’s classic form of trauma theory has been applied as a medium to pinpoint the painful experiences of a dutiful security person as well as to evaluate writing the past event as a testimony would resolve the issue or exasperate the situation further.
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Lindsay, Stuart. "Disaster Theory." English Language Notes 59, no. 2 (October 1, 2021): 109–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9277304.
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Abstract The online community of vaporwave music is a cultural development that emerged in the 2010s and therefore fully within the ideological sphere of postindustrialism. Consisting of slowed-down samples from pop songs and advertising jingles from the 1980s and 1990s stitched together with original synthesizer pieces that resemble those used in horror-film scores, vaporwave is an undead, artificial soundscape that floats somewhere between music and sound. Its fake nostalgia for an alternative yet ossified past aims to confront our contemporary social paralysis in the face of postmillennial economic failure and political crisis. This article examines gothic elements of the vaporwave music phenomenon to analyze how vaporwave expresses sociopolitical traumas of late capitalism. Derridean notions of hauntology articulate the individual’s self-isolation and objectification under the neoliberal homogenization of culture in vaporwave artist Begotten’s contributions to the hushwave subgenre of the scene (2018–19). Vaporwave’s cyclical and uncanny sounds embody the spectral haunting of Marx in capitalism’s repetitive pronunciation of victory over its vanquished, communist foe in Sunsetcorp’s 2009 single “nobody here” and the manifestations of American political trauma after 9/11 in Cat System Corporation’s signalwave album, News at 11 (2016).
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Pollicino, Rosario. "The Trauma of “Fear-Induced Exodus:” The Case of Victor Magiar and the Italian Jews of Libya." Quaderni d'italianistica 40, no. 1 (May 4, 2020): 117–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.33137/q.i..v40i1.34155.
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The Italian/Italophone Jewish community is amongst those that suffered from the Holocaust and other traumas. Drawing on the work of thinkers of trauma theory such as Dori Laub and Cathy Caruth, this paper aims to add to the current discourse on literary production by Italian/Italophone Jews by analyzing the trauma of the Italian Jewish community in postcolonial Libya, a topic often neglected by scholars. In 1967, the long-established Jewish community in Libya was forced to leave, abandoning all its property and economic funds. Victor Magiar, a Sephardic Jew born in Libya in 1957, was among those who — like all Jews who lived in Arabic lands — experienced trauma due to a myriad of factors, such as pogroms and the fact that he had no passport and true nationality. Through Magiar’s novel E venne la notte: Ebrei in un paese arabo (2003), this paper examines the trauma of the “fear-induced exodus” to Italy on the writer and his community. Moreover, a continuous dialogue with the author informs the analysis of the trauma involved in his story and the Sephardi community history, which also includes the elucidation of Jewish identity in postcolonial Libya. This paper highlights the details of history and stories that go beyond the novel itself, illuminating a nearly unknown facet of Italian history and of the country’s current multilingual and multicultural society.
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Radstone, Susannah. "Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics." Paragraph 30, no. 1 (March 2007): 9–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/prg.2007.0015.
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This article discusses the current ‘popularity’ of trauma research in the Humanities and examines the ethics and politics of trauma theory, as exemplified in the writings of Caruth and Felman and Laub.Written from a position informed by Laplanchian and object relations psychoanalytic theory, it begins by examining and offering a critique of trauma theory's model of subjectivity, and its relations with theories of referentiality and representation, history and testimony. Next, it proposes that although trauma theory's subject matter—the sufferings of others—makes critique difficult, the theory's politics, its exclusions and inclusions, and its unconscious drives and desires are as deserving of attention as those of any other theory. Arguing that the political and cultural contexts within which this theory has risen to prominence have remained largely unexamined, the article concludes by proposing that trauma theory needs to act as a brake against rather than as a vehicle for cultural and political Manicheanism.
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Rapaport, Herman 1947. "Archive trauma." diacritics 28, no. 4 (1998): 68–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dia.1998.0030.
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Ullah, Inayat. "War Memory, Psychological Trauma, and Literary Witnessing: Afghan Cultural Production in Focus." SAGE Open 10, no. 3 (July 2020): 215824402096112. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2158244020961128.
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As non-literary accounts of post-traumatic stress disorder victims depict, and contribute to, history and memory, the present study uses the theoretical underpinnings of the psychological trauma theory to reflect on the flashbacks of Afghan trauma survivors, portrayed in the selected Afghan Anglophone fiction. The research project attempts to see how far the flashbacks of the traumatic memories of these characters contribute to the oft-quoted factual history. Borrowing from Caruth, Herman, Tal and LaCapra for the analysis, the study investigates the selected literary text to see how cultural productions from this war-torn country keep a record of the traumatic memories of the war that the Afghans were faced with during the Soviet invasion from 1979 to 1989. This trauma analysis of Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (2002) shows that analyses of trauma-induced flashbacks in literary portrayals of traumatized characters may, simultaneously, contribute to the officially recorded history of the actual event of trauma. The study concludes that related literary texts may be studied in conjunction with factual historical documents to get a holistic picture of any traumatic event as well as the related memory.
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Chubinidze, Ani. "Young People and Collective Trauma in Georgian Fiction about The Abkhazian War and The 2008 Russo-Georgian War." Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature 61, no. 3 (2023): 17–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bkb.2023.a903436.
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Abstract: The ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia has brought the attention of Western academic discourses to the long history of Russian colonialism, cultural dominance, and military aggression. Ukraine has not been the only victim of Russian invasions in the last few decades. The following article depicts the voice of Georgia, a small country with a population of 3.7 million people that has also experienced the horror of war from its neighbors. This article focuses on studying the depictions of traumatized adolescents with the use of trauma theory and children's literature studies in two texts about the Abkhazian war (1992–1993) and the 2008 Russo-Georgian war: Nugzar Shataidze's "Journey to Africa" (2004) and Tamta Melashvili's Counting Out (2010). This article showcases that the discussed narratives reflect global trends in children's literature and literary trauma theory. I argue that Georgian fiction fits the pluralistic approach of the literary trauma theory, delineating individual stories intertwined with culturally and socially specific narratives. The examined texts are replete with geographic places, social values, and specific environments that shape Georgian society's collective trauma. Besides, adolescents are the central figures that expose the psychological, physical, and mental suffering that wars bring to society.
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Pallavi, Mrs Koyyana, and Prof Y. Somalatha. "A Literary Inquiry into Disability, Trauma and Narrative Strategies in Lisa Genova’s Novels." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 9, no. 3 (March 27, 2021): 114–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v9i3.10954.
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The reaisltic illustration of central characters suffering from rare and severe neurological sicknesses in Lisa Genova’s novels provide an ideal prospect to study trauma in pathography novels, a subset of science fiction. However, despite its scope, these genres of novels have received little consideration in American literary trauma studies. This paper will present a new analysis of trauma in relationship to the ‘neuro’genre, followed by an analysis of narrative and literary devices employed by the author to illustrate traumatic episodes in her novels. Through this case study and critical reflection of how the author has engaged trauma in the novels supports strengthening literary trauma theory within trauma literature and the genre also. The writing of traumatic experiences of the victims, transformed identity, stigmas, fears and phobias and providing face to the sufferer doomed fate, offers an opportunity for a neuroscientist turned novelist like Lisa Genova to advocate about the neurological sicknesses and its suffering with enriched empathetic experience to the non-scientific societies. It also provides a balanced realistic narrative platform for the reader to reflect on their own uncertainties, brought on by the representation of such fictional characterization. This literary research analysis will provide scope to science fiction authors, particularly those aiming to engage with medicine and literature, for a more accurate depiction of trauma in their work. It will further broaden the scope of research in phenomenology, narrative and genre theories and criticism in literary studies.
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Vidal Barría, Cristian Ignacio. "(Im) posibilidad de escribir el trauma. El silencio en El profundo Sur de Andrés Rivera." Anclajes 25, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 167–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.19137/anclajes-2021-25112.
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The questions around literary writing and its possibilities for representing violence and historical trauma is a current discussion in both philosophical and literary studies. This article addresses these complexities and examines, through a reading of the novel El profundo Sur (1999) by Argentine writer Andrés Rivera, the possibilities of the literary text as a device that tries to represent or depict violence and trauma through a fictional narrative. The novel takes as its setting and historical reference the massacre of workers in Buenos Aires in 1919, also known as the “Semana Trágica”. Rivera, whose aesthetics is marked by the use of the ellipsis, elaborates a reflection on language, fiction, and the reconstruction of a historical event through literature.
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Huang, Yan. "The Unprescence of China’s COVID-19 Trauma and Its Impact on Social Identity." English Language and Literature Studies 11, no. 4 (November 4, 2021): 48. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v11n4p48.
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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—a representative modern trauma—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.
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Rambo, Shelly. "Haunted (by the) Gospel: Theology, Trauma, and Literary Theory in the Twenty-First Century." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 125, no. 4 (October 2010): 936–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.4.936.
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At the end of the twentieth century, the expansion of trauma from a therapeutic concept to a way of theorizing about the ruptures of history and memory had, in Geoffrey Hartman's words, added a “displaced evangelical intensity” to literary studies (293). The literary turn to trauma highlighted an ethical dimension to practices of writing, reading, and interpretation; texts were then freighted by violence, called to witness the horrors of history, challenging claims to the clarity and accessibility of words and narrative. Hartman conveys his hesitations about this turn by invoking a religious term—“evangelical”—which is etymologically related to gospel, or “good news.” His concern about an infusion of religious zeal into the study of literature may enact a critical refutation of the historical erasure of Jewish origins by Christian claims to “good news.”
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Gumb, Lynn. "Trauma and Recovery: Finding the Ordinary Hero in Fictional Recovery Narratives." Journal of Humanistic Psychology 58, no. 4 (December 29, 2017): 460–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022167817749703.
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Our desire to speak, to tell the stories of our personal and communal suffering, offered literature myriad tales spanning continents and histories. Traumatic experience has been recorded for historical reference and has been represented in fiction as individual and collective stories. The word “trauma” is so broadly used in contemporary vernacular that it is difficult to wrangle it into a simple definition. Literary theory, informed by the fields of social psychology, neurobiology, psychology, and psychiatry, has developed contradictory theories of trauma, and contentious debates continue as theorists try to capture what has become an almost indefinable term. Links between trauma and heroism exist in trauma fiction which can be teased from existing literary canons or from contemporary novels. Traditional notions of heroism, much like the concept of trauma, are complex and weighted with a catalogue of elements that may serve to complicate an already multifarious field of study. Notions of heroism can be integrated within a new trauma narrative that reveals a new subject, the recovery process. I argue for a shift from the focus on trauma stories of wounding, or on suffering, and revenge narratives to repositioning literary trauma studies toward more life-affirming subjectivities emerging from recovery narratives. It is my view that recovery narratives consist of three associated elements: resilience, reconciliation, and resistance. I demonstrate how trauma survivors can be read as heroes in their own tales of recovery, and how the story of the hero can be infused into the trauma narrative, or teased from existing texts, to create a productive and progressive narrative rather than the destructive and degenerative approach that focusses on extreme responses to trauma. It is my position that recovery from trauma, as depicted in literary fiction, can be productively read as a tale of “ordinary” heroism.
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Qing, Zhao. "Song of Chinese American Females- A Traumatic Reading of The Woman Warrior." IRA International Journal of Education and Multidisciplinary Studies 16, no. 3 (September 11, 2020): 171. http://dx.doi.org/10.21013/jems.v16.n3.p6.
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Maxine Hong Kingston is a famous Chinese American writer, who is adept at interpreting the living conditions of Chinese American immigrants by making vivid and profound description. She writes several influential novels and the publication of her masterpiece The Woman Warrior makes her immediately renowned in the American literary circle. This paper is going to apply trauma theory to describe the Chinese females’ miserable fates, to further explore the causes of their trauma, and to focus on how they treat trauma, overcome trauma and become “woman warriors”.
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Forter, Greg. "Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form." Narrative 15, no. 3 (2007): 259–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nar.2007.0022.
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Obourn, M. "Audre Lorde: Trauma Theory and Liberal Multiculturalism." MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 30, no. 3 (September 1, 2005): 219–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/melus/30.3.219.
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Hurley, Kelly. "Trauma and Horror." English Language Notes 59, no. 2 (October 1, 2021): 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9277216.
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Foster, Dennis A., and James Berger. "Trauma and Memory." Contemporary Literature 41, no. 4 (2000): 740. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1209010.
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Puspita, Yulia Mega. "The Depiction of the Meaning of Death through Iola and Anest Character in Salt Root and Roe." Cultural Narratives 1, no. 2 (December 31, 2023): 51–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.59066/cn.v1i2.553.
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Death has meaning for each individual, which sometimes holds meaning about the psychological soul in literature. Anxiety, fear of abandonment, and betrayal become unconscious individual factors. These factors are not only conveyed in physical and emotional form but also in the written form of literary works such as contemporary drama. This study discusses how the meaning of death is tied to anxiety, fear of abandonment, and betrayal in a play entitled Salt Root and Roe by Tim Price. This literary work shows how the deaths of the main characters, namely Iola and Anest, twin sisters, are linked to incidents of anxiety and fear originating from childhood trauma, so this influences their subconscious decisions. To analyze and answer the study objectives, the author used qualitative research methods with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory approach. This study analyzes from the perspective of Freud's psychoanalysis using the tripartite theory of id, ego, and superego of the characters Iola and Anest to discover the character's desires and decisions influenced by their environment. In the process of this analysis, it was discovered that the twin characters, Iola and Anest, had trauma in their childhood, which resulted in anxiety, betrayal, and fear of being abandoned by each other or being abandoned by their loved ones due to the influence of an environment and family that was less than supportive during their childhood. In addition, this study found that Iola and Anest's meaning of death tied each other to each other, indicating that their relationship did not want to be abandoned again and experienced the trauma and disappointment of being abandoned in the past. Tragic death in this literary work means a togetherness created by the characters' deep-seated fears, traumas, and betrayals.
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Maulood, Nahro O., and Sherzad SH Barzani. "Trauma in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson." Koya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 3, no. 1 (June 26, 2020): 107–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.14500/kujhss.v3n1y2020.pp107-122.
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August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (1987) is a play which deals with the social life of a broken African American family in Pittsburg – a city in Pennsylvania – who migrated from the South. The family’s grandparents, who were slaves on a Southern plantation, were separated and exchanged with a piano. This shocking incident causes cross-generational trauma and other traumatic incidents for the family as they retrieved the piano. This study examines the play through the lens of Literary Trauma Theory. This theory appeared in the middle of 1990s, henceforth it has been developed by so many scholars, and the latest revision is made by Joshua Pederson, an Associate Professor of Humanities at Boston University, in 2014. The first wave of the theorists claim that trauma causes amnesia for the victims; they can neither remember nor describe what they have experienced, but Pederson in his revised edition of the theory proves the opposite. By applying the latest version of trauma theory this study shows how slavery, its aftermath or its legacy affected and haunted African Americans, and created trauma or historical trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for the African Americans.
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Dudley, Jack. "Ecology without Civilization." English Language Notes 59, no. 2 (October 1, 2021): 91–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9277293.
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Abstract While Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy has been read through the uncanny human traumas and tropes of “contamination” in its first novel, Annihilation, the trilogy’s radical ecological thought emerges more clearly through cosmic and transformative trauma in the final novel, Acceptance. Rather than some contaminated space, Area X is restoring Earth’s ecosystems to a “pristine” state, but in a process of guided succession that traumatizes human life as lived under ecologically destructive neoliberal economies of extraction. Reading the twinned falls of Saul and Control, this article shows how Acceptance reimagines uncanny trauma for a new form that is painful but also familiar, human but also posthuman, and utterly necessary for planetary survival.
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He, Chu. "Physical Responses to Trauma." Critical Survey 31, no. 3 (September 1, 2019): 70–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/cs.2019.310307.
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This article compares Brian Friel’s play Give Me Your Answer, Do! with Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing to inquire into why the characters react to their traumas with seemingly aberrant behaviours. These two modern Irish works seem to suggest that the characters find a devious, physical way of self-preservation when combatting their extremely powerless state of traumatisation, which exposes our conflicting drives in the face of trauma: although trauma is mostly associated with death drive towards self-destruction, we cannot overlook its connection to life drive. By analysing these traumatised characters’ bodies as the very platform on which the symbiosis of the two opposing instincts is staged, this article explores trauma’s indelible impacts on the body and the body’s troubled resilience.
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Yeboah, Philomena Ama Okyeso, Paul Otoo, Philip Kwame Freitas, Lucy Korkoi Bonku, and Charity Azumi Issaka. "UNDERSTANDING THE CHILD SOLDIER IN UZODINMA IWEALA’S NOVEL, BEASTS OF NO NATION." Language Literacy: Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Language Teaching 6, no. 2 (December 27, 2022): 412–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.30743/ll.v6i2.6164.
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The academic space has witnessed in recent times, a plethora of research works on child soldiering. However, the majority of these works are often viewed from a non-literary perspective. Using textual analysis which is purely qualitative in nature, this paper, from a literary perspective, focused on examining the representation of the child soldier figure in Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation by paying particular attention to the characterization of the child soldier as an individual who transitions from a victim of war to a victimizer. With the help of the trauma theory, the paper discussed and provided an understanding of the physiological factors and reactions that necessitate this transition. Based on Bloom’s concepts of trauma and the general theory of trauma, the paper finds that the child soldier transitions from a victim of war to a victimizer is a result of the fear that overwhelms him. Again, the child soldier undergoes this transition in order to survive the war – anarchetypal mammalian survival response. This study is significant as it has contributed to the existing literature on child soldier narratives in Africa and provided an understanding of the child soldier’s reactions and responses to the devastating trauma that accompanies war.
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Vickroy, Laurie. ""It's More Terrible Not to Remember": Alexievich and Women's War Literature." Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal 54, no. 4 (December 2021): 65–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mos.2021.a903588.
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Abstract: Svetlana Alexievich's text brings to light women veterans' testimonies of lingering World War II traumas that challenge militaristic discourses. This study analyzes how Alexievich helped them claim their testimonial voices and provoked them to reveal traumatic effects and to contextualize and organize their words into trauma narratives.
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Adhraa AbdulHussein Naser, Dr. "Iraq Wars: From A literary text to Social Context." لارك 3, no. 46 (June 30, 2022): 45–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.31185/lark.vol3.iss46.2548.
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This article investigates Iraq wars presentation in literature and media. The first section investigates the case of the returnees from the war and their experience, their trauma and final presentation of that experience. The article also investigates how trauma and fear is depicted to create an optimized image and state of fear that could in turn show Iraqi society as a traumatized society. Critics such as Suzie Grogan believes that the concept of trauma could expand to influence societies rather than one individual after exposure to trauma of being involved in wars and different major conflicts. This is reflected in Iraq as a country that was subjected to six comprehensive conflicts in its recent history, i.e. less than half a century; these are the Iraq-Iran war, the first Gulf war, the economic sanctions, the second Gulf war 2003, the civil war, and the wars of liberation against ISIS.
The second section investigates Franco Moretti's theory of the Dialectic of Fear and the implication of this hypothesis of stereotyping on the Iraq war and its transformation from an anomaly expressed issue in the media and creative texts to a social reality that is measured by presenting what is not acceptable as an acceptable pattern in the case of war and shock between Iraq and the wars that took place in the west, and the extent of its impact on the protraction of the state of social trauma suffered by Iraqis, who are still suffering under the effects of prolonged political conflicts even after the end of military field conflicts.
The research sheds the light on studies such as the Dialectic of Fear by Franco Moretti, Risk Society by Ulrich Beck and Oh My God: Diaries of American Soldiers in Mesopotamia edited and translated by Buthaina Al-Nasiri.
Key words: Iraqi war, trauma, risk society, social context, stereotyping.
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Sreenivasan, Janani, and Manali Karmakar. "Insidious Trauma: A Literature Review." World Journal of English Language 13, no. 2 (February 22, 2023): 384. http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/wjel.v13n2p384.
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Despite the promising development of trauma studies as an interdisciplinary phenomenon, the notion of insidious trauma is often relegated to its margins. As a theory with its roots in feminist psychotherapeutic practices of scholars such as Maria Root and Laura Brown, the paradigm of insidious trauma provides scope to discuss mundane and everyday experientialities of trauma that result from socially marginalized positions. The central aim of this paper is to aver that there is a need to expand the category of insidious trauma to explore the quotidian traumas of marginalized groups. For this, the paper presents analogous feminist and masculinist understandings of trauma experienced due to individuals’ complex entanglement with the patriarchal discourse. In exploring the notion of insidious trauma through a feminist lens, the paper connects it to the theories of coercive control, patriarchal terrorism, and betrayal trauma. The paper also discusses paradigms of male trauma that concur with the theory of insidious trauma. In this course, the paper presents the historical failure of the diagnosis of male hysteria. It discusses how narrow understandings of masculinity in a patriarchal culture have generated emotionally stunted development in men and foreclosed their avenues to seek help for domestic violence. The paper then posits that expanding Michael Rothberg’s category of the implicated subject provides a way to throw light on how the entire patriarchal social structure is complicit in generating male and female victims of its ideology.
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CROWNSHAW, RICHARD. "Deterritorializing the “Homeland” in American Studies and American Fiction after 9/11." Journal of American Studies 45, no. 4 (November 2011): 757–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021875811000946.
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Literary criticism has debated the usefulness of the trauma paradigm found in much post-9/11 fiction. Where critiqued, trauma is sometimes understood as a domesticating concept by which the events of 9/11 are incorporated into sentimental, familial dramas and romances with no purchase on the international significance of the terrorist attacks and the US's response to them; or, the concept of trauma is understood critically as the means by which the boundaries of a nation or “homeland” self-perceived as violated and victimized may be shored up, rendered impermeable – if that were possible. A counterversion of trauma argues its potential as an affective means of bridging the divide between a wounded US and global suffering. Understood in this way, the concept of trauma becomes the means by which the significance of 9/11 could be deterritorialized. While these versions of trauma, found in academic theory and literary practice, invoke the spatial – the domestic sphere, the homeland, the global – they tend to focus on the time of trauma rather than on the imbrication of the temporal and the spatial. If, instead, 9/11 trauma could be more productively defined as the puncturing of national fantasies of an inviolable and innocent homeland, fantasies which themselves rest on the (failed) repression of foundational violence in the colonial and settler creation of that homeland, and on subsequent notions of American exceptionalism at home and, in the exercise of foreign policy, abroad, then the traumatic can be spatialized. In other words, understood in relation to fantasy, trauma illuminates the terroritalization and deterritorialization of American history. After working through various examples of post-9/11 fiction to demonstrate parochial renditions of trauma and trauma's unrealized global resonances, this article turns to Cormac McCarthy's 9/11 allegory The Road for the way in which its spaces, places and territories are marked by inextricable traumas of the past and present – and therefore for the way in which it models trauma's relation to national fantasy.
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Lozinski-Veach, Natalie. "Uncertain Turns: Addressing Animal Trauma." Diacritics 50, no. 3 (2022): 122–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dia.2022.a908410.
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Abstract: Since the development of modern trauma theory, the limits of the human have worn increasingly thin. Today, mounting evidence of psychological injuries in other species poses new challenges for trauma studies. How might we think trauma beyond the human? What would such an effort unsettle, which epistemic structures would it destabilize? Reading Cathy Caruth with Jacques Derrida and W.G. Sebald, this essay considers nonhuman trauma as an apostrophic address that provokes radical uncertainty. The inherently aporetic structure of trauma theory cannot a priori exclude this address without fixing in place, and therefore undoing, its own foundations. Address-ability in the face of animal trauma hinges on the collapse of all certitudes, rendering possible responses rooted in something other than power. Such exposure turns us away from the familiar, toward the ungraspable traumatic histories that are catching up with us in this very moment of climate change and mass extinctions.
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Omwocha, Verah Bonareri. "‘To Name the Unnameable is a Curse’: Silence as an Enunciation of Trauma in Yvonne Owuor’s Dust (2014) and The Dragonfly Sea (2019)." East African Journal of Arts and Social Sciences 5, no. 2 (December 9, 2022): 207–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.37284/eajass.5.2.1000.
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Various studies have interrogated the language of silence as a powerful tool of communication. This paper adds to such studies by interrogating silence as an enunciation of trauma in Yvonne Owuor’s texts Dust (2014) and The Dragonfly Sea (2019). Focusing on the characters of Akai and Ajany in Dust and Munira and Ayaana in The Dragonfly Sea, this paper is a critical interrogation of how these characters use silence to narrate their traumas. The characters under interrogation embody silence as the language of trauma in this postcolonial nation. They seem plagued by the memories of the traumatic experiences they undergo and this hinders their ability to use speech to articulate their pain. The paper starts with an introduction that covers an overview of related literature and then goes on to explore the binaries between lack of verbal speech, oppression, resistance, and trauma as espoused by the female characters. This paper also analyses the depiction of violence and silencing of the female characters by the men in their lives and on a larger scale, the silence enforced by state machineries and its metaphoric function in this post-independent country. Therefore, interpreting silence offers a multiplicity of meanings and different layers and convergences of meanings upon which it may be interpreted. It also discusses breaking that silence, a signifier of healing. The study is based on Literary Trauma Theory and trauma theory tenets as advanced by the following trauma theorists: Cathy Caruth, Dominic LaCapra, Judith Herman, Maria Root, Alan Gibbs, and Laura Brown
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Trajkovski, Filip. "Imagining heart of darkness: the treatment of social trauma in postcolonial literary theory." Социолошка ревија/The Sociological review, no. 2 (2015): 81–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.47054/sr152081t.
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Marshall, Nowell. "Queer Trauma in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree." English Language Notes 59, no. 2 (October 1, 2021): 50–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9277260.
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Abstract Despite winning numerous literary awards, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s work has received little critical attention. Scholars have focused on Kiernan’s reworking of H. P. Lovecraft’s influential weird fiction and have discussed Kiernan’s pioneering work in New Weird fiction and short fiction. As astute as much of the critical work is, none of it addresses the cornerstone of Kiernan’s fiction: trauma. This essay considers Kiernan’s novel The Red Tree as a queer American gothic novel dealing with trauma and its lingering effects on its witnesses. Through its complex, fragmentary form and its use of dream sequences and unconsciously produced narratives, the novel invites readers to witness and consume Sarah Crowe’s trauma while loosely theorizing the relationship between trauma and queer temporality and spatiality.
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Ayodeji, Adewuyi Aremu. "World without a Word: Reading Silence in Selected Recent Nigerian Poetry." Journal of Language and Literature 22, no. 1 (March 23, 2022): 15–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.24071/joll.v22i1.3396.
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Trauma is not a recent motif in Nigerian literature. Literary critics have copiously investigated into the trauma of Nigerian Civil War. However, the Boko Haram insurgency, which has ravaged many communities majorly in the North-East of Nigeria, has introduced a new dimension of exploring trauma into Nigerian literature. The literary dimension is patterned around what, in a broad term, may be called ‘trauma of Boko Haram’. The inability of traumatized Nigerian female victims of the Boko Haram insurgency to unequivocally express the extent of atrocities perpetrated against them by those who should ordinarily be their saviours, confidants or helpers (after the attack) is the main focus of this study. Trauma theory was used to analyse the selected poems taken from a book edited by Ojaide et al. (2019), The Markas: An Anthology of Literary Works on Boko Haram. It was established, on the one hand, that these ‘doubly’ traumatised women are forced to subsist merely in a world of silence – the sole response to the second phase of trauma – by these ‘traumatising tools’. On the other hand, the women’s silence is sustained or prolonged by the subconscious awareness of loss of hopes of recovery. It can be concluded, then, that all the ‘artificial situations or measures’ created to silence the crying voice of the female victims of the Boko Haram insurgency accordingly aggravate their traumatic memory.
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Stanley Novaldo and Sayyid Khairunas. "Gender Dysphoria And Trauma Towards Main Character In I Wish You All The Best Novel By Mason Deaver." Journal of Applied Linguistics 4, no. 1 (July 5, 2024): 24–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.52622/joal.v4i1.237.
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This study aimed to analyze gender dysphoria and trauma in Ben de Backer, who is the main character of Mason Deaver's novel entitled I Wish You All the Best. This novel tells the ups and downs in the life of Ben de Backer a non-binary who is still underage. The object of this study is to analyze the symptoms of gender dysphoria and trauma in a non-binary student, in this case, Ben de Backer, and provide an overview of mental issues as well as gender and sexuality for readers. In theory, the researcher wishes to develop theoretical knowledge of literature related to gender and mental health. Practically, this research is useful as a reference for readers who will carry out similar research, especially in terms of gender dysphoria and trauma in other literary works. This research is included in the type of literary criticism because the writer interprets and analyzes a literary work, especially a novel. The data in this study were taken directly through quotations from the novel, as well as from various other sources. The results of this study showed that gender dysphoria and trauma exist and have real impacts on human beings. Gender dysphoria can cause trauma if the response to the problem is rejection, which can lead to other major problems, such as anxiety, eating disorders, and depression Keywords : Gender Dysphoria; Trauma; Literature
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Hatten, C. "Literary Trauma: Sadism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Amercan Women's Fiction." American Literature 74, no. 3 (September 1, 2002): 677–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-74-3-677.
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Sanyal, Debarati, and Dominick LaCapra. "Writing History, Writing Trauma." SubStance 31, no. 2/3 (2002): 301. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3685496.
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