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Journal Article

Mending Wounds?: Healing, Working through, or Staying in Trauma: An Introduction

01 Jul 2013-Journal of Literary Studies (Literator Society of South Africa)-Vol. 29, Iss: 2, pp 1
TL;DR: The articles selected for this volume address the aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions of trauma in southern African and North American contexts by exploring the role that embodied traces of traumatic experiences plays in imagining--or, on the contrary, refusing--the healing and mending of lived traumas.
Abstract: The articles selected for this volume address the aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions of trauma in southern African and North American contexts Focusing on the material, corporeal embodiment of trauma in wounds and scars (and their psychosomatic analogues), these articles explore the role that these embodied traces of traumatic experiences plays in imagining--or, on the contrary, refusing--the healing and mending of lived traumas To put it differently, these articles trace the strategies through which attempts have been made within various contexts to give closure to trauma and to begin the process of collective or personal healing Trauma studies, as is well known, emerged in the 1990s as an offshoot of ethical and psychoanalytic criticism; like these fields, it was marked by an intense concern with otherness and the challenges it poses to the representational capacities of both language and the visual media Trauma theorists, including Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, and Dominick LaCapra, emphasised accordingly the unrepresentability of major traumas Caruth, for example, argues in Trauma: Explorations of Memory (1995) that trauma disrupts the ordinary mechanisms and representations of consciousness and memory; instead, the traumatic event, dissociated from cognitive and representational processes, returns in the form of flashbacks, repetitive phenomena, and traumatic nightmares According to this view, testimonies of trauma occur through the breakdown of representational forms, and the unleashing or transmission of a traumatised and traumatising otherness Dominick LaCapra notes too that trauma "is a shattering experience that distorts memory", rendering it thereby "vulnerable and fallible in reporting events" (2009: 61) Testimonies, then, are "authenticated or validated" (p 61) through their continued display of the wounds left by the symptomatic effects of trauma What emerges from these discussions as a serious challenge to the possibility of representing trauma is, in fact also, and primarily, a sobering check on attempts to imagine the working-though of traumatic experiences, however hesitant or limited these attempts might be Certainly, trauma theory has consistently rejected the possibility of granting closure to traumas or beginning anew for the subject of trauma These possibilities LaCapra describes as stemming from "a truncated, stereotypical idea of working-through as a facile form of uplift, closure, identity formation, integration of the lost other, taking leave of the past, and denial of loss" (2009: 65) From our perspective, trauma theory's investment in the continuing working-through of traumatic experiences, an investment that also fixes in place and maintains the field's disciplinary subject, raises more questions than it answers While acknowledging and consenting to trauma theory's caution against investing overhastily in accounts of the working-through or mending of trauma, the contributors to this volume are not inclined to dismiss too hurriedly accounts of healing, mending, reconciliation, reparation and the overcoming of trauma Nor are they ready to concede out of hand that trauma remains unrepresentable: wounds and scars, after all, materialise and give visual form to traumatic experiences in the here-and-now, granting them a degree of corporeality and tactility That is not to say that this embodiment of trauma necessarily makes the traumatic experience more interpretable or assimilable; it relocates it to a sphere non-identical to consciousness and memory, however, and thereby enables a potentially different relationship to traumatic experiences from those privileged by trauma theory The narratives concerning the healing and mending of wounds addressed in this volume also suggest that trauma theory has given premature closure to discussions concerning the efficacy of working through traumas Gabriele Schwab notes that traumatic writing offers a paradox: there are traumatic experiences that are unrepresentable, yet narrative, storytelling, and testimonies "are necessary for healing trauma" (2010: 48) …
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29 Jul 2020-Safundi
TL;DR: In this article, the authors set the context for the nine articles included in Safundi's special issue on "Cultures of Populism: Institutions and Hegemonic Practices" (Vol. 21, no. 3).
Abstract: This short Introduction sets the context for the nine articles included in Safundi’s special issue on “Cultures of Populism: Institutions and Hegemonic Practices” (Vol. 21, no. 3) by establishing c...

1 citations