Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives

✍ Scribed by Dana Mihailescu; Roxana Oltean

• Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 406
• Edition: Unabridged
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume collects work by several European, North American, and Australian academics who are interested in examining the performance and transmission of post-traumatic memory in the contemporary United States. The contributors depart from the interpretation of trauma as a unique exceptional event that shatters all systems of representation, as seen in the writing of early trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dominick LaCapra. Rather, the chapters in this collection are in conversation with more recent readings of trauma such as Michael Rothberg's multidirectional memory (2009), the role of mediation and remediation in the dynamics of cultural memory (Astrid Erll, 2012; Aleida Assman, 2011), and Stef Craps' focus on postcolonial witnessing and its cross-cultural dimension (2013).The corpus of post-traumatic narratives under discussion includes fiction, diaries, memoirs, films, visual narratives, and oral testimonies. A complicated dialogue between various and sometimes conflicting narratives is thus generated and examined along four main lines in this volume: trauma in the context of multidirectional memory; the representation of trauma in autobiographical texts; the dynamic of public forms of national commemoration; and the problematic instantiation of 9/11 as a traumatic landmark.

✦ Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE
WHEN THE HOLOCAUST COMES TO HARLEM
NEGOTIATING TRAUMASVIA CROSS-CULTURAL URBAN IDENTITYCONFIGURATIONS OUT OF GRIEF
“STALINTOWNS APLENTY”
CAST IN STONE
CREATING A NEO-HOODOOMYTHOLOGY
PART TWO
FROM “ANGEL OF MERCY”TO “RADICALMUSLIM”
PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMASOFMUTILATION AND JAMES ELLROY’SLOS ANGELES
THE AFTER-LIFE OF IMAGES
THE TRANSGRESSIVE MOURNERIN JOAN DIDION’S THE YEAR OF MAGICALTHINKING (2005) AND BLUE NIGHTS (2011),AND JOYCE CAROL OATES’SAWIDOW’S STORY (2011)
PART THREE
CONTEMPORARY WARMEMORIALSAND THE URBAN LANDSCAPE
THE GENDERED APPROACH
PROSTHETICMEMORIESOF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT’S INFANTILEPARALYSIS AS NARRATIVE EMBODIMENTSFOR TRAUMATIC AMERICANWARMEMORY
PART FOUR
HEALING THE NATION,MEMORIALIZING TRAUMA
WRITING POST-TRAUMATIC MEMORIES,WRITING THE CITY
THE SPECTATOR-SURVIVOR
ARTICULATION AND EVASION
GENDER AND THE NOSTALGIC BODYIN POST-9/11 FICTION
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX