Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Domestic Trauma And Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home In Charles Dickens’S Dombey And Son, Katherine E. Ostdiek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In “Domestic Trauma and Imperial Pessimism: The Crisis At Home in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son,” Katherine Ostdiek discusses Dickens’s representation of violence, grief, and recovery within the Victorian home as a pre-Freudian example of trauma. This comparison not only demonstrates the importance of trauma studies in the nineteenth-century, but more importantly, it thematically focuses empathy for the traumatized on the home. In this novel, Dickens dismisses topics related to the financial and social crises of mid-century Britain in favor of domestic themes that emphasize an idealized structure of the Victorian family. Through her use of trauma theory and …

The Punctum In History: Representing The M(Other)’S Death In Peter Handke’S A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Hivren Demir Atay

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article aims to discuss how Handke’s autobiographical narrative, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972), stages the writer’s literary project through a neutral account of his mother’s suicide. Telling the story of his mother, who witnessed the Second World War and the nazi regime, Handke narrates the traumatic history of an Austrian town along with his own suffering. Concentrating on his attempt at a distanced language and his questioning of history as an objective fact, the article suggests that Handke’s perception of death and mourning parallels his understanding of the acts of writing and reading. Drawing particularly on Barthes’s concept …

Trauma, Creativity, And Bearing Witness Through Art: Marian Kołodziej's Labyrinth, Alyssa Logie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The mid-2000s brought rise to significant shifts in the field of trauma studies, most notably the suggestion that a survivor’s trauma can have meaning when it is shared with others through creative representation and storytelling. Despite these critical changes in the field, there is a dearth of research outside of clinical art therapy that examines the role of creativity in the processes of working through past traumas for survivors, and in the processes of bearing witness to the trauma of others.

In an effort to address these issues, I use a framework of relational psychoanalysis and feminist philosophy to explore …

Vulnerability And Resistance In Carmen Aguirre’S Mexican Hooker #1, Cinta Mesa

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, “Vulnerability and Resistance in Carmen Aguirre’s Mexican Hooker#1,” Cinta Mesa examines Chilean-Canadian playwright and actress Carmen Aguirre’s latest autobiographical novel, Mexican Hooker#1, to analyze Latina vulnerability in relation to exile, emigration, gender violence and stereotypes. The article relies upon Judith Butler’s definition of vulnerability (20), which is excluded from official texts. The consequences of these types of trauma, which are written on female bodies, are expressed through post-traumatic stress disorder. The author expresses the difficulty of acting because of her post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and the challenges she meets on her way to heal herself and …

Trespassing Physical Boundaries: Transgression, Vulnerability And Resistance In Sarah Kane’S Blasted (1995), Paula Barba Guerrero, Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Sarah Kane’s Blasted has been analyzed from various perspectives that address the layers of destruction it exposes. From the questioning of its title and meaning, to the unravelling of the protagonists’ abusive relationship, the analyses have emphasized the depiction of vulnerability as the defining human trait that Jean Ganteau observes in contemporary British literature. However, a key aspect has been overlooked in the critical response to the play: for Kane vulnerability does not equal helplessness, but rather stands in opposition to it. Hence, this article concentrates on how Blasted formulates a new understanding of vulnerability that fits Judith Butler’s later …

Graphic Content Warning; Personal And Political Traumas, Emily K. Wardell

Theses and Dissertations

The written portion of this thesis work is meant to address and further investigate the visual work created using mediums of print and found video. This artistic research has been interested in examining varying associations with truth, recollection, and evidence. This includes the recollection of public histories and news-media narratives as well as my own history and trauma. Through this work my aim was to create a deconstruction and revolt against how associations are formed, and how to understand imagery as information. This thesis first discusses my relationship to appropriated imagery, then connects and examines it through the addition of …