Abstract
The Introduction takes as a point of departure the growing attention devoted to the representation of trauma and memory in the critical field and proposes a move beyond the orthodoxies of Trauma Studies as established by Cathy Caruth and other Yale School critics through a systematic interrogation of its main tenets, its confrontation with the main tenets of Memory Studies, and the transversal expanding of the analytical frame through the incorporations of relevant insights from related critical and philosophical frameworks, such as postcolonial criticism, the theory of affects, ethical criticism, food studies, archival and historical research, educational transmission of knowledge and generic approaches. In other words, it argues for the combination of the purely aesthetic with the political and/or ethical implications of the literary works, and contends that the alliance of traditional textual approaches, such as close readings or the use of narrative theory, with both neighbouring and distant critical frameworks, and notions, such as Levinasian ethics, Homi Bhabha’s concept of “unhomeliness,” Abraham and Torok’s “phantom,” Joyce Carol Oates’s study on “boxing” or Eve K. Sedgwick’s theorisation on affects, can yield surprisingly effective results when analysing the literary representation of violence and trauma.
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- 1.
Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire , 3 vols. (Gallimard: Paris, 1984, 1986, 1992).
- 2.
Andreas Huyssen , Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
- 3.
Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
- 4.
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).
- 5.
Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Violence, 1992 (London: Pandora, 2001).
- 6.
Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999).
- 7.
Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 266–97.
- 8.
Ibid., 296.
- 9.
Wulf Kansteine, and Harald Weilnböck, “Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma or How I Learned to Love the Suffering of Others without the Help of Psychotherapy,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 7.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Michael Rothberg, “There is No Poetry in This: Writing, Trauma and Home,” Trauma at Home: After 9/11, ed. J. Greenberg (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 147.
- 12.
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 77.
- 13.
Ibid., 75.
- 14.
Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. P. Brault and M. Nass (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).
- 15.
David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003), 2.
- 16.
Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 65.
- 17.
Ibid., 24.
- 18.
Ibid., 204.
- 19.
See Mary Warnock, Memory (London: Faber & Faber, 1987); Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory; Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sue Campbell, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (Lanhan, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
- 20.
Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown, and Ami Sodaro, eds., Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 3.
- 21.
Eve K. Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds., Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1995). Eve K. Sedgwick, Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003).
- 22.
Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011), 442n22.
- 23.
Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015), 8–9.
- 24.
Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-through,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. III (1893–1899), ed. and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 47–156.
- 25.
Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer , “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication,” 1893, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. II (1893–1895), ed. and trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Vintage, 2001), 3–17.
- 26.
Pierre Janet, The Mental State of Hystericals: A Study of Mental Stigmata and Mental Accidents, trans. Caroline Rollin Corson (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901).
- 27.
Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question , 5; Susana Onega, “ The Notion of Paradigm Shift and the Roles of Science and Literature in the Interpretation of Reality,” The European Review 22, no. 3 (2014): 491–503.
- 28.
Dori Laub and Daniel Podell, “Art and Trauma.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76, no. 5 (1995): 991–1005; Jean-Michel Ganteau , and Susana Onega, “Introduction: Performing the Void: Liminality and the Ethics of Form in Contemporary Trauma Narratives,” in Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form, ed. Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–20.
- 29.
Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, 4.
- 30.
Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).
- 31.
Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 32.
Laub and Podell, “Art and Trauma,” 993.
- 33.
Ibid., 995.
- 34.
Ibid., 997.
- 35.
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1, ed., trans. and Intro. Nicholas Rand (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).
- 36.
Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing (Garden City, NY: Dolphin/Doubleday, 1987).
- 37.
Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” trans. John Czaplicka, New German Critique 65 (Spring–Summer, 1995): 125–33.
- 38.
W.B. Yeats, “Leda and the Swan,” in The Tower, 1928, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Allspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 441.
- 39.
César Vallejo, Trilce. 1922. 1930, ed. and trans. Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2005).
- 40.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952 , foreword Homi Bhabha, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Books, 1986).
- 41.
W. Theodor Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” 1951. Gesammelte Schriften 10.1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), 11–30.
- 42.
Anne Enright, The Gathering, 2007 (London: Vintage, 2008).
- 43.
Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. A. McClintock, A. Mufti, and E. Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 445–55.
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Onega, S., del Río, C., Escudero-Alías, M. (2017). Introduction. In: Onega, S., del Río, C., Escudero-Alías, M. (eds) Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55278-1_1
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