Download or read book Reading Testimony Witnessing Trauma written by Eden Wales Freedman and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-02-28 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about—or witnessing—trauma in order to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women and adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature. Eden Wales Freedman articulates a theory of reading (or dual-witnessing) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. She places these original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in African American literature. The volume also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively. Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma’s innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.
Download or read book Extremities written by Nancy K. Miller and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we come to terms with what can't be forgotten? How do we bear witness to extreme experiences that challenge the limits of language? This remarkable volume explores the emotional, political, and aesthetic dimensions of testimonies to trauma as they translate private anguish into public space. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw have assembled a collection of essays that trace the legacy of the Holocaust and subsequent events that have shaped twentieth-century history and still haunt contemporary culture. Extremities combines personal and scholarly approaches to a wide range of texts that bear witness to shocking and moving accounts of individual trauma: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Tatana Kellner's Holocaust art, Ruth Klüger's powerful memoir Still Alive, and Binjamin Wilkomirski's controversial narrative of concentration camp suffering Fragments. The book grapples with the cultural and social effects of historical crises, including the Montreal Massacre, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the medical catastrophes of HIV/AIDS and breast cancer. Developing insights from autobiography, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and gender studies, the authors demonstrate that testimonies of troubling and taboo subjects do more than just add to the culture of confession--they transform identities and help reimagine the boundaries of community. Extremities offers an original and timely interpretive guide to the growing field of trauma studies. The volume includes essays by Ross Chambers, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others.
Download or read book Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony written by Dori Laub and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychoanalytic work with socially traumatised patients is an increasingly popular vocation, but remains extremely demanding and little covered in the literature. In Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony, a range of contributors draw upon their own clinical work, and on research findings from work with seriously disturbed Holocaust survivors, to illuminate how best to conduct clinical work with such patients in order to maximise the chances of a positive outcome, and to reflect transferred trauma for the clinician. Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony closely examines the phenomenology of destruction inherent in the discourse of extreme traumatization, focusing on a particular case study: the recording of video testimonies from a group of extremely traumatized, chronically hospitalized Holocaust survivors in psychiatric institutions in Israel. This case study demonstrates how society reacts to unwanted memories, in media, history, and psychoanalysis – but it also shows how psychotherapists and researchers try to approach the buried memories of the survivors, through being receptive to shattered life narratives. Questions of bearing witness, testimony, the role of denial, and the impact of traumatic narrative on society and subsequent generations are explored. A central thread of this book is the unconscious countertransference resistance to the trauma discourse, which manifests itself in arenas that are widely apart, such as genocide denial, the "disappearance" of the hospitalized Holocaust survivors and of their life stories, mishearing their testimonies and ultimately refusing them the diagnosis of "traumatic psychosis". Psychoanalysis and Holocaust Testimony provides an essential, multidisciplinary guide to working psychoanalytically with severely traumatised patients. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and trauma studies therapists.
Download or read book The Limits of Autobiography written by Leigh Gilmore and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh Gilmore analyzes texts that depict trauma by combining elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory in ways that challenge the constraints of autobiography. Astute and compelling readings of works by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson explore how each poses the questions "How have I lived?" and "How will I live?" in relation to the social and psychic forms within which trauma emerges. First published in 2001, this new edition of one of the foundational texts in trauma studies includes a new preface by the author that assesses the gravitational pull between life writing and trauma in the twenty-first century, a tension that continues to produce innovative and artful means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation.
Download or read book Seeing Human Rights written by Sandra Ristovska and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As video becomes an important tool to expose injustice, an examination of how human rights organizations are seeking to professionalize video activism. Visual imagery is at the heart of humanitarian and human rights activism, and video has become a key tool in these efforts. The Saffron Revolution in Myanmar, the Green Movement in Iran, and Black Lives Matter in the United States have all used video to expose injustice. In Seeing Human Rights, Sandra Ristovska examines how human rights organizations are seeking to professionalize video activism through video production, verification standards, and training. The result, she argues, is a proxy profession that uses human rights videos to tap into journalism, the law, and political advocacy. Ristovska explains that this proxy profession retains some tactical flexibility in its use of video while giving up on the more radical potential and imaginative scope of video activism as a cultural practice. Drawing on detailed analysis of legal cases and videos as well as extensive interviews with staff members of such organizations as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, WITNESS, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the International Criminal Court (ICC), Ristovska considers the unique affordances of video and examines the unfolding relationships among journalists, human rights organizations, activists, and citizens in global crisis reporting. She offers a case study of the visual turn in the law; describes advocacy and marketing strategies; and argues that the transformation of video activism into a proxy profession privileges institutional and legal spaces over broader constituencies for public good.
Download or read book Testimony written by Shoshana Felman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unique collection, Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub examine the nature and function of memory and the act of witnessing, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust. Moving from the literary to the visual, from the artistic to the autobiographical, and from the psychoanalytic to the historical, the book defines for the first time the trauma of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing "the unprecedented historical occurrence of...an event eliminating its own witness." Through the alternation of a literary and clinical perspective, the authors focus on the henceforth modified relation between knowledge and event, literature and evidence, speech and survival, witnessing and ethics.
Download or read book Shattered Subjects written by S. Henke and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judith Herman has noted that 'the most common post-traumatic disorders are those not of men in war but of women in civilian life.' How have women survived, both individually and collectively, in the face of unimaginable trauma? In this important new book, Suzette A. Henke finds evidence that women often use writing in order to heal the wounds of psychological trauma. The literary testimonies of Colette, Hilda Doolittle, AnaIs Nin, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, and Sylvia Fraser provide startling evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder precipitated by rape, incest, childhood sexual abuse, grief, unwanted pregnancy, pregnancy-loss, or severe illness. Their writings are used as a means for survival and healing. Henke analyzes traumatic narrative as the focal point of a large body of autobiographical practice representing the genre of narrative recovery. Shattered Subjects suggests that the powerful medium of written autobiographical testimony may allow the resolution or reconfiguration of the most emotionally distressing experiences.
Download or read book Victims written by Ross McGarry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of victims of crime is a central concern for criminologists around the world. In recent years, some victimologists have become increasingly engaged in positivist debates on the differences between victims and non-victims, how these differences can be measured and what could be done to improve the victims' experience of the criminal justice system. Written by experts in the field, this book embraces a much wider understanding of social harms and asks which victims' voices are heard and why. McGarry and Walklate break new ground with this innovative and accessible book; it offers a broad discussion of social harms, the role of the victim in society and the inter-relationship between trauma, testimony and justice and asks: how has harm been understood and under what circumstances have those harms been recognised? how and under what circumstances are those harms articulated? how and under what circumstances are the voices of those who have been harmed listened to? Each chapter draws on case studies and a range of questions designed to assist in reflection and critical engagement. This book is perfect reading for students taking courses on victimology, victims and society, victims’ rights and criminal justice.
Download or read book Testimony and Trauma written by Amanda Hontz Drury and published by Fortress Academic. This book was released on 2021 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesus' crucifixion was a traumatic event. After Jesus' resurrection, the disciples were both astonished and terrified--Jesus was no longer dead, but the wounds from the crucifixion were still etched in his body. The return of Jesus was supposed to be a joyous occasion, but the trauma of the weekend's events nevertheless creeped into the space following the resurrection. The resurrection story is one of betrayal, denial, beatings, public rejection, humiliation, and execution. Experiences like this do not disappear from memory. Christ has died, Christ is risen, but trauma will come again. Testimony and Trauma explores the Christian practice of testimony through the lens of articulation theory in order to facilitate healing.
Download or read book The Social Life of Memory written by Norman Saadi Nikro and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-19 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume addresses memory practices among youth, families, cultural workers, activists, and engaged citizens in Lebanon and Morocco. In making a claim for ‘the social life of memory,’ the introduction discusses a particular research field of memory studies, elaborating an approach to memory in terms of social production and engagement. The Arab Spring is evoked to draw attention to new rifts within and between history and remembrance in the regions of North Africa and the Middle East. As authoritarian forms of governance are challenged, official panoramic narratives are confronted with a multiplicity of memories of violent pasts. The eight chapters trace personal and public inventories of violence, trauma, and testimony, addressing memory in cinema, in newspapers and periodicals, as an experience of public environments, through transnational and diasporic mediums, and amongst younger generations.
Download or read book Spiritual Wounds written by Síobhra Aiken and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the widespread scholarly and popular belief that the Irish Civil War (1922-1923) was followed by a 'traumatic silence.' It achieves this by revealing an alternative archive of published testimonies which were largely recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. These testimonies were written by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, in both English and Irish, and nearly all have eluded sustained scholarly attention to date. However, the act of smuggling private, painful experience into the public realm, especially when it challenged official memory making, demanded the cautious deployment of self-protective narrative strategies. As a result, many testimonies from the Irish Civil War emerge in non-conventional, hybridised, and fictionalised forms of life writing. This book re-introduces a number of these testimonies into public debate. It considers contemporary understandings of mental illness and how a number of veterans--both men and women--self-consciously engaged in projects of therapeutic writing as a means to 'heal' the 'spiritual wounds' of civil war. It also outlines the prevalence of literary representations of revolutionary sexual violence, challenging the assumptio
Download or read book Witnessing Witnessing written by Thomas Trezise and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witnessing Witnessing focuses critical attention on those who receive the testimony of Holocaust survivors. Questioning the notion that traumatic experience is intrinsically unspeakable and that the Holocaust thus lies in a quasi-sacred realm beyond history, the book asks whether much current theory does not have the effect of silencing the voices of real historical victims. It thereby challenges widely accepted theoretical views about the representation of trauma in general and the Holocaust in particular as set forth by Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, Berel Lang, and Dori Laub. It also reconsiders, in the work of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, reflections on ethics and aesthetics after Auschwitz as these pertain to the reception of testimony. Referring at length to videotaped testimony and to texts by Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, and Jorge Semprun, the book aims to make these voices heard. In doing so, it clarifies the problems that anyone receiving testimony may encounter and emphasizes the degree to which listening to survivors depends on listening to ourselves and to one another. Witnessing Witnessing seeks to show how, in the situation of address in which Holocaust survivors call upon us, we discover our own tacit assumptions about the nature of community and the very manner in which we practice it.
Download or read book Trauma written by Cathy Caruth and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1995-06 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished group of analysts and critics offers a compelling look at what literature and the new approaches of theoretical disciplines bring to the understanding of traumatic experiences such as child abuse, AIDS, and the effects of historical atrocities such as the Holocaust. "These essays offer fresh approaches on the subject of trauma from both a psychoanalytic and contemporary theoretical point of view".--Alan Bass, Ph.D., psychoanalyst.
Download or read book Psychoanalysis Trauma and Community written by Judith L. Alpert and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trauma is one of the hottest contemporary topics within psychoanalysis, whilst many psychoanalysts are increasingly interested in applying their skills outside the traditional setting of the consulting room, especially in response to disasters, wars and serious social issues. Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community seeks to correct the misconceptions of what analysts do and how they do it and debunk the stereotype of psychoanalysts stuck in their offices plying their wares on the worried well. Bringing together a group of eminent contributors, this volume considers how psychoanalysis may best be expanded to help in social and community settings, to understand these wider issues from a psychoanalytic perspective, and provide clear clinical guidance and clinical examples of how best to work in a wide variety of non-traditional ways. The innovative work featured includes taking testimony, in-situ interviewing, documentary film-making, social activism, ethnic and political conflict mediation, on-site workshops as well as direct clinical interventions. The reader is taken from the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the Vietnam War to the Balkan Wars and Palestinian-Israeli conflict, from the political violence of the disappeared in Argentina to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, and from chronic conditions of poverty in India to racism in the post-Jim Crow South. Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Community will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and anyone studying on the increasing number of trauma courses being given today in universities. Lay readers with an interest in the traumatic fallout as a result of chronic conditions or the myriad disasters that occur globally will find this book illuminating. For the non-specialist mental health professional, including non-analytic psychotherapists, social workers and others who work in the community, this book offers concrete advice on dealing with intervention issues such as entry and integration, as well as on management of multiple and complex trauma in a non-clinical setting.
Download or read book Listening to Trauma written by and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-11-25 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Features interviews with a diverse group of leaders in the theorization of, and response to, traumatic experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Download or read book Traumatic Possessions written by Jennifer L. Griffiths and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of traumatic stress have explored the challenges to memory as a result of extreme experience, particularly in relation to the ways in which trauma resonates within the survivor’s body and the difficulties survivors face when trying to incorporate their experience into meaningful narratives. Jennifer Griffiths examines the attempts of several African American writers and playwrights to explore ruptures in memory after a traumatic experience and to develop creative strategies for understanding the inscription of trauma on the body in a racialized cultural context. In the literary and performance texts examined here, Griffiths shows how the self is reconstituted through testimony—through the attempt to put into language and public statement the struggle of survivors to negotiate the limits placed on their bodies and to speak controversial truths. Dessa in her jail cell, Venus in the courtroom, Sally on the auction block, Ursa in her own family history, and Rodney King in the video frame—each character in these texts by Sherley Anne Williams, Suzan-Lori Parks, Robbie McCauley, Gayl Jones, and Anna Deavere Smith gives voice not only to the limits of language in representing traumatic experience but also to the necessity of testimony as the public enactment of memory and bodily witness. In focusing specifically and exclusively on the relation of trauma to race and on the influence of racism on the creation and reception of narrative testimony, this book distinguishes itself from previous studies of the literatures of trauma.
Download or read book Trauma and Literature written by J. Roger Kurtz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a concept, 'trauma' has attracted a great deal of interest in literary studies. A key term in psychoanalytic approaches to literary study, trauma theory represents a critical approach that enables new modes of reading and of listening. It is a leading concept of our time, applicable to individuals, cultures, and nations. This book traces how trauma theory has come to constitute a discrete but influential approach within literary criticism in recent decades. It offers an overview of the genesis and growth of literary trauma theory, recording the evolution of the concept of trauma in relation to literary studies. In twenty-one essays, covering the origins, development, and applications of trauma in literary studies, Trauma and Literature addresses the relevance and impact this concept has in the field.
