Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“No Man’S Land”: Fairy Tales, Gender, Socialization, Satire, And Trauma During The First And Second World Wars, Dawn Heerspink

Grand Valley Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Béatrix Beck: The “Barny Cycle”: Writing To Inform And Heal The Self, Myrna Bell Rochester, Mary Lawrence Test

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

To cope with the traumatic reality of World War II, French society repressed its memories, resulting in a false collective memory. Today, a more truthful history can be restored with the study of wartime and post-war texts. We examine the first six books (1948-67) of Belgian-French writer Béatrix Beck (1914-2008), alongside the theories of psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, who wrote that “traumatic reactions occur when action is of no avail.” Beck’s semi-autobiographical protagonist, Barny, goes through Herman’s stages of forgetting and remembering, healing and recovery. Her emergence as a writer also follows that trajectory: Barny, like Occupied France, was isolated. …

Trauma And Transformative Passage, Reed A. Morrison Private Practice

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The strategic introduction of stressors to intentionally produce targeted psychological states

has a long history among indigenous peoples. Rites of passage ceremonies commonly involve

subjecting individuals to controlled violence to attain desired transformative outcomes. In

this context, violence is held to be sacred and generative, ritually introducing distress in

the service of loosening orientation and preparing the individual for spiritual advancement

and the acquisition of a new identity. Traditional ritual initiation ceremonies are typically

tripartite and characterized by stages of Separation, Ordeal, and Return. This article suggests

that accounts of the experiences of initiates in Separation and Ordeal stages bear …

Erotic Mourning And Post-Traumatic Sexual Desire, Gila G. Ashtor

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Erotic Mourning and Post-traumatic Sexual Desire" Gila Ashtor investigates the ways Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 2000 memoir contains an alternative logic of affectivity that locates possibilities for mourning in the ambivalent directionalities of post-traumatic sexual desire. Ashtor links dominant conceptualizations of post-traumatic working-through and regimes of heteronormative sexual reproductivity in order to argue that Eggers's self-exhibitionistic spectacle of failed post-traumatic healing, precisely as a drama of undoing that replaces the cumulative acquisition of psychic cohesion with survival incoherent gestures, produces a version of what this paper will call "radical mourning." To particularize the …

Trauma And Transmission: Echoes Of The Missing Past In Dora Bruder, Judith Greenberg

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay begins with the ethical imperative that Dora Bruder puts forward: to pay attention to the stories of the pain of others that had been ignored during the Holocaust. But Dora Bruder is also full of "missing pieces"—missing details in Dora's life story, missing elements in the narrator's relationship with his father, and the missing understanding that necessarily occurs in relation to "knowing" trauma and particularly, the Holocaust. The essay looks at those "missing pieces" both through insights in trauma theory and through the lens of 9/11, which introduced a new sense of the "missing" to this writer. It …

Jewish History And Memory In Paul Celan's "Du Liegst" , Irene Fußl

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the poem "DU LIEGST" (1967), Paul Celan demonstrates his mindfulness of historical dates as memorials to past traumas—the execution of the conspirators of the plot to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919, and the be-heading of Danton in 1794. Celan has also written the specific date of the poem into the text, although hidden, and weaves together Jewish tradition and events of the recent past in a lyric exploration of human suffering. Building on the hitherto predominantly biographical readings of the poem, the presence of traditional Jewish texts (Old …

A Clear-Sighted Witness: Trauma And Memory In Maryse Condé'S Desirada, Dawn Fulton

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maryse Condé's 1997 novel recounts a young Guadeloupean woman's frustrating search for the identity of her father. Because the information she seeks is initially guarded by her mother and later contradicted by friends and family, this heroine confronts an epistemological impasse, a potentially traumatic event to which she will never have direct access. Informed by Toni Morrison's reflections on memory and invention and by recent studies in trauma theory, this essay examines the ways in which Condé negotiates this impasse in her novel, creating a narrative field of knowledge that allows for its own lacunae and maintains multiple registers of …

Men In (Shell-)Shock: Masculinity, Trauma, And Psychoanalysis In Rebecca West's The Return Of The Soldier , Misha Kavka

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This paper undertakes to read Rebecca West's first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), as a critical exploration of masculine trauma on the one hand and an ambivalent engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis on the other. The novel proves interesting as a site in which two shifting cultural contexts intersect: the wartime culture of England facing the "shell shock" of its men, and the contemporaneous infusion of English intellectual culture with psychoanalytic ideas. Though the effects of new war technology and "a newer kind of doctor," West challenge existing notions of stable masculinity, West maintains that masculinity has all along …

The Past And The Present In The Early Novels Of Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Ernestine Schlant

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Hanns-Josef Ortheil's early novels Fermer, 1979 and Hecke, 1983 have male protagonists who search for self-identity in the West Germany of the 1980s. In the process, they discover that they are profoundly influenced by the lives and experiences of their parents, particularly as these lives were shaped during and by the Hitler regime. In Fermer, the 19-year old protagonist rebels against this society by going AWOL. Yet in his geographical flight and intellectual analyses he realizes his deep emotional bonds with the expectations and behavior of the parent generation. Recognition of these bonds is only the first …