Through case studies that examine historical and contemporary crises across the world, the contributing writers to this volume explore the cultural and social construction of trauma. How do some events get coded as traumatic and others which seem equally painful and dramatic not? Why do culpable groups often escape being categorised as perpetrators? These are just some of the important questions answered in this collection. Some of the cases analysed include Mao's China, the Holocaust, the Katyn Massacre and the Kosovo trauma. Expanding the pioneering cultural approach to trauma, this book will be of interest to scholars and postgraduate students of sociology.
Draws on current theories of trauma to examine the prehistory of those psychic and somatic responses to trauma now known as PTSD and their influence on Victorian fiction.
In the 1990's, South Africa surprised the world with a peaceful, negotiated transition from armed conflict to an inclusive democracy. This was followed by the ground-breaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to confront and work through a troubled past. The search for truth and reconciliation in South Africa, however, is far from completed; the country is in many ways still burdened by unresolved individual and collective traumas. In this book, two academics from the University of Cape Town, one a psychologist and the other a literary scholar, explore the importance of narrative as a way of working through trauma. Although written from within a South African context, the work has a much wider relevance. It offers illuminating perspectives on the process of narrating our healing: the sharing of personal narratives, the appropriation of literary narratives, and above all, the re-creating of life narratives shattered by trauma. It is a book about the search for meaning when all meaning seems to have been lost; it deals with the overwhelming nature of traumatic suffering, yet offers some hope of healing.The book is remarkably overarching, tailored to the needs of scientists and practitioners in the fields of psychology, social work, education and literature. It offers a strong message to all individuals and nations who live in an atmosphere of blame, shame and hopelessness. - Yuval Wolf, Professor of Psychology and Dean of Social Sciences, Bar-Ilan University.Narrating Our Healing is a good book in the widest sense of that adjective: it is well constructed, meticulously researched, and likely to deepen understanding of the difficult but profoundly important subject of trauma and how to address it. It is something like a handbook for living with suffering – both one's own and that of others. To have constructed a text that can serve such a purpose is a profoundly admirable achievement. Annie Gagiano, LitNet.It is a timeous and exciting study that should be essential reading for anyone grappling with our present, our past and our future. - Andrè P Brink – South African and international authorThis is one of the best books I have ever read on healing deep wounds.- Vamÿk D. Volkan, M. D. Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia.We need to know the truth about what happened in South Africa during the Apartheid years. Van der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela have given us the tools to face that challenge. - Rolf Wolfswinkel, Professor of Modern History, New York University.
This book is a collection of essays offering an inside view into the inner analysis of traumatic literary studies wherein language is used as a medium of expression so as to interpret man, psyche and memory. By making literature the partner of a dialogue with psychology, in order to better comprehend the psyche, it serves to alter the way of understanding the literary phenomenon. Featuring relevant coverage on topics such as literary production, psychology in literature, identity, and traumatic studies, this book provides in-depth analysis that is suitable for academicians, students, professionals, and researchers interested in discovering more about the relationship between psychology and literature and their effects on thinking.
Deceptive Fictions: Narrating Trauma and Violence in Contemporary Writing explores the widespread narrative concern with trauma and violence, and their interactions with identity, meaning, ethics, history, memory and various other related issues in a selection of novels by prolific contemporary British and Irish writers. Interrogating the strategic functions of trauma and violence, the book argues that these texts can be read as counter-narratives to, or a backlash against, still-prevalent critical paradigms informed by poststructuralist and postmodern thought. Trauma and violence are invoked as narrative tools to communicate the centrality of the body and of biological and material constraints on human actions. This emphasis on reality and the experiential ties in with the novels’ consistent focus on the individual as an ethical agent and originator of meaning. In so doing, they signal a move in contemporary fiction towards a textual practice that can most fruitfully be approached along the lines of an individualistic, evolutionary, corporeal and experiential narratology, which self-consciously reflects on the manipulative potentials of narrative.
A thrilling story of scientific detective work and medical potential that illuminates the newly understood role of microglia—an elusive type of brain cell that is vitally relevant to our everyday lives. “The rarest of books: a combination of page-turning discovery and remarkably readable science journalism.”—Mark Hyman, MD, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Food: What the Heck Should I Eat? NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED Until recently, microglia were thought to be helpful but rather boring: housekeeper cells in the brain. But a recent groundbreaking discovery has revealed that they connect our physical and mental health in surprising ways. When triggered—and anything that stirs up the immune system in the body can activate microglia, including chronic stressors, trauma, and viral infections—they can contribute to memory problems, anxiety, depression, and Alzheimer’s. Under the right circumstances, however, microglia can be coaxed back into being angelic healers, able to make brain repairs in ways that help alleviate symptoms and hold the promise to one day prevent disease. With the compassion born of her own experience, award-winning journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa illuminates this newly understood science, following practitioners and patients on the front lines of treatments that help to “reboot” microglia. In at least one case, she witnesses a stunning recovery—and in others, significant relief from pressing symptoms, offering new hope to the tens of millions who suffer from mental, cognitive, and physical health issues. Hailed as a “riveting,” “stunning,” and “visionary,” The Angel and the Assassin offers us a radically reconceived picture of human health and promises to change everything we thought we knew about how to heal ourselves.
Trauma and Meaning Making highlights multiple practices of meaning making after traumatic events in the lives of individuals and communities. Meaning making consists both in a personal journey towards a new way to exist and live in a world shattered by trauma and in public politics locating and defining what has happened. In both perspectives, the collection evaluates the impact achieved by naming the victim/s and thus the right of the victim/s to suffer from its aftermath or by refusing to recognise the traumatic event and thus the right of the victim/s to respond to it. A range of paradigms and techniques invite readers to consider anew the specificities of context and relationship while negotiating post-traumatic survival. By delineating how one makes sense of traumatic events, this volume will enable readers to draw links between practices grounded in diverse disciplines encompassing creative arts, textual analysis, public and collective communication, psychology and psychotherapy, memory and memorial.
Why are so many contemporary comics and graphic narratives written as memoirs or documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a specific relationship between the comics form and the documentation and reportage of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made on comics readers shape their relationships with traumatic events? And how does comics’ documentation of traumatic pasts operate across national borders and in different cultural, political, and politicised contexts? The sixteen chapters and three comics included in Documenting Trauma in Comics set out to answer exactly these questions. Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the contributors bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generative force that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.
Literary Aesthetics of Trauma: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson investigates a fundamental shift, from the 1920s to the present day, in the way that trauma is aesthetically expressed. Modernism's emphasis on impersonality and narrative abstraction has been replaced by the contemporary trauma memoir and an ethical imperative to bear witness.
