Writing History Writing Trauma

Author : Dominick LaCapra
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421414015
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writing History, Writing Trauma written by Dominick LaCapra and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014-09-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated edition of a major work in trauma studies. Trauma and its aftermath pose acute problems for historical representation and understanding. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra critically analyzes attempts by theorists and literary critics to come to terms with trauma and with the crucial role post-traumatic testimonies—notably Holocaust testimonies—assume in thought and in writing. These attempts are addressed in a series of six interlocking essays that adapt psychoanalytic concepts to historical analysis, while employing sociocultural and political critique to elucidate trauma and its aftereffects in culture and in people. This updated edition includes a substantive new preface that reconsiders some of the issues raised in the book.

Author : David Chrisinger
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421440806
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stories Are What Save Us written by David Chrisinger and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A foreword by former soldier and memoirist Brian Turner, author of My Life as a Foreign Country, and an afterword by military wife and memoirist Angela Ricketts, author of No Man's War: Irreverent Confessions of an Infantry Wife, bookend the volume.

Author : Dominick LaCapra
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801467764
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book History, Literature, Critical Theory written by Dominick LaCapra and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander's two-volume, prizewinning history Nazi Germany and the Jews. A recurrent motif of the book is the role of the sacred, its problematic status in sacrifice, its virulent manifestation in social and political violence (notably the Nazi genocide), its role or transformations in literature and art, and its multivalent expressions in "postsecular" hopes, anxieties, and quests. LaCapra concludes the volume with an essay on the place of violence in the thought of Slavoj Zizek. In LaCapra's view Zizek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence."

Author : Melanie Brooks
Publisher : Beacon Press
ISBN 13 : 0807078816
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Writing Hard Stories written by Melanie Brooks and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the country’s most admired authors—including Andre Dubus III, Mark Doty, Marianne Leone, Michael Patrick MacDonald, Richard Blanco, Abigail Thomas, Kate Bornstein, Jerald Walker, and Kyoko Mori—describe their treks through dark memories and breakthrough moments and attest to the healing power of putting words to experience. What does it take to write an honest memoir? And what happens to us when we embark on that journey? Melanie Brooks sought guidance from the memoirists who most moved her to answer these questions. Called an essential book for creative writers by Poets & Writers, Writing Hard Stories is a unique compilation of authentic stories about the death of a partner, parent, or child; about violence and shunning; and about the process of writing. It will serve as a tool for teachers of writing and give readers an intimate look into the lives of the authors they love. Authors profiled in Writing Hard Stories: Andre Dubus III, Sue William Silverman, Michael Patrick MacDonald, Joan Wickersham, Kyoko Mori, Richard Hoffman, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Abigail Thomas, Monica Wood, Mark Doty, Edwidge Dantict, Marianne Leone, Jerald Walker, Kate Bornstein, Jessica Handler, Richard Blanco, Alysia Abbott, and Kim Stafford Insights from Writing Hard Stories “Why we endeavor collectively to write a book or paint a canvas or write a symphony...is to understand who we are as human beings, and it’s that shared knowledge that somehow helps us to survive.”—Richard Blanco “Here’s what you need to understand: your brothers [or family or friends] are going to have their own stories to tell. You don’t have to tell the family story. You have to tell your story of being in that family.”—Andre Dubus III “We all need a way to express or make something out of experiences that otherwise have no meaning. If what you want is clarity and meaning, you have to break the secrets over your knee and make something of those ingredients.”—Abigail Thomas “What we remember and how we remember it really tells us how we became who we became.”—Michael Patrick MacDonald “The reason I write memoir is to be able to see the experience itself...I hardly know what I think until I write...Writing is a way to organize your life, give it a frame, give it a structure, so that you can really see what it was that happened.”—Sue William Silverman “After a while in the process, you have some distance and you start thinking of it as a story, not as your story...It was a personal grief, but no longer personal...[It’s] something that has not just happened to me and my family, but something that’s happened in the world.”—Edwidge Danticat “Tibetan Buddhists believe that eloquence is the telling of a truth in such a way that it eases suffering...The more suffering that is eased by your telling of the truth, the more eloquent you are. That’s all you can really hope for—being eloquent in that fashion. All you have to do is respond to your story honestly, and that’s the ideal.”—Kate Bornstein “You can never entirely redeem the experience. You can’t make it not hurt anymore. But you can make it beautiful enough so that there’s something to balance it in the other scale. And if you understand that word beautiful as not necessarily pretty, then you’re getting close to recognizing the integrative power of restoring the balance, which is restoring the truth.”—Richard Hoffman

Author : Amos Goldberg
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253030218
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Trauma in First Person written by Amos Goldberg and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of what can be learned by looking at the journals and diaries of Jews living during the Holocaust. What are the effects of radical oppression on the human psyche? What happens to the inner self of the powerless and traumatized victim, especially during times of widespread horror? In this bold and deeply penetrating book, Amos Goldberg addresses diary writing by Jews under Nazi persecution. Throughout Europe, in towns, villages, ghettos, forests, hideouts, concentration and labor camps, and even in extermination camps, Jews of all ages and of all cultural backgrounds described in writing what befell them. Goldberg claims that diary and memoir writing was perhaps the most important literary genre for Jews during World War II. Goldberg considers the act of writing in radical situations as he looks at diaries from little-known victims as well as from brilliant diarists such as Chaim Kaplan and Victor Kemperer. Goldberg contends that only against the background of powerlessness and inner destruction can Jewish responses and resistance during the Holocaust gain their proper meaning. “This is a book that deserves to be read well beyond Holocaust studies. Goldberg’s theoretical insights into “life stories” and his readings of law, language and what he calls the “epistemological grey zone” . . . provide a stunning antidote to our unthinking treatment of survivors as celebrities (as opposed to just people who have suffered terrible things) and to the ubiquity of commemorative platitudes.” —Times Higher Education “Every decade or so, an exceptional volume is born. Provocative and inspiring, historian Goldberg’s volume is one such work in the field of Holocaust studies. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Amos Goldberg’s Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust is an important and thought-provoking book not only on reading Holocaust diaries, but also on what that reading can tell us about the extent of the destruction committed against Jews during the Holocaust.” —Reading Religion “Amos Goldberg’s work offers an innovative approach to the subject matter of Holocaust diaries and challenges well-established views in the whole field of Holocaust studies. This is a comprehensive discussion of the phenomenon of Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust and after.” —Guy Miron. Author of The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary “This is an important contribution to trauma studies and a powerful critique of those who use the “crisis” paradigm to study the Holocaust.” —Dovile Budryt, Georgia Gwinnett College, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Author : Gabriele Rippl
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1442646012
Total Pages : 361 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Haunted Narratives written by Gabriele Rippl and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring life writing from a variety of cultural contexts, Haunted Narratives provides new insights into how individuals and communities across time and space deal with traumatic experiences and haunting memories. From the perspectives of trauma theory, memory studies, gender studies, literary studies, philosophy, and post-colonial studies, the volume stresses the lingering, haunting presence of the past in the present. The contributors focus on the psychological, ethical, and representational difficulties involved in narrative negotiations of traumatic memories. Haunted Narratives focuses on life writing in the broadest sense of the term: biographies and autobiographies that deal with traumatic experiences, autobiographically inspired fictions on loss and trauma, and limit-cases that transcend clear-cut distinctions between the factual and the fictional. In discussing texts as diverse as Toni Morrison's Beloved, Vikram Seth's Two Lives, deportation narratives of Baltic women, Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, and Ene Mihkelson's Ahasveeruse uni, the contributors add significantly to current debates on life writing, trauma, and memory; the contested notion of “cultural trauma”; and the transferability of clinical-psychological notions to the study of literature and culture.

Author : Doug Underwood
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252093437
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Chronicling Trauma written by Doug Underwood and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To attract readers, journalists have long trafficked in the causes of trauma--crime, violence, warfare--as well as psychological profiling of deviance and aberrational personalities. Novelists, in turn, have explored these same subjects in developing their characters and by borrowing from their own traumatic life stories to shape the themes and psychological terrain of their fiction. In this book, Doug Underwood offers a conceptual and historical framework for comprehending the impact of trauma and violence in the careers and the writings of important journalist-literary figures in the United States and British Isles from the early 1700s to today. Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work. The most extensive scholarly examination of the role that trauma has played in the shaping of our journalistic and literary heritage, Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss discusses more than a hundred writers whose works have won them fame, even at the price of their health, their families, and their lives.

Author : Dominick LaCapra
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801457688
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book History and Its Limits written by Dominick LaCapra and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-23 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny). In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular," even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj Zizek. In a related vein, he discusses Martin Heidegger's evocative, if not enchanting, understanding of "The Origin of the Work of Art." LaCapra subjects to critical scrutiny the sometimes internally divided way in which violence has been valorized in sacrificial, regenerative, or redemptive terms by a series of important modern intellectuals on both the far right and the far left, including Georges Sorel, the early Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, and Ernst Jünger. Violence and victimization are prominent in the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra questions prevalent anthropocentrism (evident even in theorists of the "posthuman") and the long-standing quest for a decisive criterion separating or dividing the human from the animal. LaCapra regards this attempt to fix the difference as misguided and potentially dangerous because it renders insufficiently problematic the manner in which humans treat other animals and interact with the environment. In raising the issue of desirable transformations in modernity, History and Its Limits examines the legitimacy of normative limits necessary for life in common and explores the disconcerting role of transgressive initiatives beyond limits (including limits blocking the recognition that humans are themselves animals).

Author : Jonathan Lichtenstein
Publisher : Little, Brown Spark
ISBN 13 : 0316540994
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Berlin Shadow written by Jonathan Lichtenstein and published by Little, Brown Spark. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deeply moving memoir that confronts the defining trauma of the twentieth century, and its effects on a father and son. In 1939, Jonathan Lichtenstein's father Hans escaped Nazi-occupied Berlin as a child refugee on the Kindertransport. Almost every member of his family died after Kristallnacht, and, upon arriving in England to make his way in the world alone, Hans turned his back on his German Jewish culture. Growing up in post-war rural Wales where the conflict was never spoken of, Jonathan and his siblings were at a loss to understand their father's relentless drive and sometimes eccentric behavior. As Hans enters old age, he and Jonathan set out to retrace his journey back to Berlin. Written with tenderness and grace, The Berlin Shadow is a highly compelling story about time, trauma, family, and a father and son's attempt to emerge from the shadows of history.

Author : Dominick LaCapra
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501705083
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Representing the Holocaust written by Dominick LaCapra and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Representing the Holocaust is an impressive book that will have a significant impact on the way historians think about the Holocaust and the writing of history. LaCapra's precise and probing study explores the ways that the traumatic event inevitably disrupts the relationship between representation and memory. He writes from the deep conviction that whatever historians might believe, theory is indispensable for them. Indeed, his work best exemplifies the value of theory, setting a standard for historiographical reflection that is not easily matched."—Anson Rabinbach, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art