Venue: 11 Bedford Square, room GSB2

Dr Ruth Glynn, Senior Lecturer in Italian, University of Bristol

‘Trauma and the Leaden Years’

The legacy of Italy’s widespread and prolonged experience of political violence in the period known as the ‘anni di piombo’ (years of lead, c. 1969-83) has begun to be interrogated through the prism of trauma theory. This paper sets out the case for pursuing such a reading of the anni di piombo as cultural and collective trauma paying close attention to issues of repression and hypervigilance in Italian cultural and legal responses to those years. It then turns to address, more specifically, the traumatic import of women’s participation in the political violence of the anni di piombo, with reference to critical perspectives on the roles traditionally assigned women in discourses relating to culture and nation.

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Dr Giuliana Pieri, Senior Lecturer in Italian, RHUL

‘Trauma and Memory after Fascism: Italian Art and Fascist Violence’

This paper will focus on Italian art in the period 1938-46 ca. As Italian Fascism entered its final phase, Italian artists began to show a  new violent imagery in their works. This paper will focus on war art and its contemporary and postwar reception as a means to interrogate the difficult and still debated legacy of Italian Fascism in Italy. I began to reflect upon the possible links between trauma theory and the reception of Fascism in postwar Italian culture when I curated the exhibition Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator (London: Estorick, 2010). Some of the images which will be the focus of my talk can be found in the exhibition website: http://mussolinicult.com

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questions:

Venue: 11 Bedford Square, room GSB2

Speaker: Dr Dora Osborne, University of Nottingham

Title: ‘What Remains: Trauma and the Archive in Contemporary German Memory Culture’

The archive stands in complex relation to history and fiction, perhaps no more so than when it carries the traces of traumatic impact. The notions of Trauma, Fiction, History, brought together in this research group, are of critical concern to post-1945 German Studies. In their configuration they ask questions of memory and witness, but also, increasingly and urgently, of the archive. What kind of archive material remains ‘after Auschwitz’? And how is this used by artists and authors in the attempted representation of Germany’s traumatic past? Drawing on examples from recent German-language literature (Durs Grünbein) and visual art (Anselm Kiefer), this paper will consider the relation of archive to Trauma, Fiction, History.

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Introduction by Colin Davis .

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talk:

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questions:

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Date: Wednesday 24 November, 5.00 pm
Venue: Royal Holloway, IN032

Speakers:

Professor John O’Brien, RHUL, ‘Beginnings and Trauma’

Dr Timothy Chesters, RHUL, ‘Divine Trauma’

On the face of things, there seems something ineradicably modern about trauma as a concept. Born, as ‘traumatic neurosis’, alongside modern psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century, and revitalised within deconstruction at the close of the twentieth, trauma theory has also been shaped by a series of – it is sometimes supposed – uniquely modern catastrophes: World War I, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam. So what if anything can trauma theory reveal of other historical periods? Is to speak of trauma in the early modern period, for example, merely to indulge in futile anachronism? Or can trauma theory still teach us something about early modern violence and the mental scars it left behind? More provocatively, perhaps, can early modern texts tell us anything of trauma theory itself: its assumptions, its blind spots, its own unspoken past? In the first of a two-part mini-series on ‘Trauma and the Early Modern’, Timothy Chesters and John O’Brien test the applicability of trauma theory in a number of texts arising out of the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598).

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Introduction by Colin Davis

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John O’Brien – Beginnings and Trauma

handout: Beginnings and Trauma (download)

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Timothy Chesters – Divine Trauma

handout: Divine Trauma (download)

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questions:

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Speakers: Professor Robert Eaglestone and Professor Dan Stone

Title: Trauma and History: Approaches to the Holocaust

Abstract:
How should we write and talk about the Holocaust? Do the facts speak for themselves, or do they defy speech altogether? Does trauma provide a lens which can help us understand the Holocaust or does it confuse an already bewilderingly complex issue? Aiming to go beyond polemical simplifications, two leading scholars from different disciplinary fields will discuss whether it is necessary, possible or even desirable to give clear cut answers to questions such as these.

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Introduction by Colin Davis:

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Professor Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway. For more information, click HERE.

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Professor Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway. For more information, click HERE.

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questions:

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Date:

Venue: Royal Holloway, WIN 002

Speaker: Professor Lawrence R. Schehr

Title: ‘Combatting Basophobia: Fictionalised Trauma in Beigbeder’s Windows on the World‘

Abstract: Frédéric Beigbeder’s 2003 novel, Windows on the World, is a fictional representation of the events of 11 September 2001 as told through a double narrative, with an American narrator who is trapped with his two sons in one of the towers and a French narrator who is arguably a rhetorical figure of the author. In his novel, Beigbeder recounts the events that are known to one and all, but does so in a search for meaning, sense, and logic that did not necessarily present themselves in the immediate ‘live’ unfurling of the story. In so doing, he develops a work that reflects some of the concerns expressed by French philosophers including Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Virilio, and, at the same time, explores the limits of narrative fiction’s capacities to represent.

About the speaker: Lawrence R. Schehr is Professor of French at the University of Illinois. He works predominantly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative, contemporary literature and culture, and queer theory. Recent books include two volumes from 2009: Subversions of Verisimilitude:  Reading Narrative from Balzac to Sartre (Fordham UP) and French Post-Modern Masculinities: From Neuromatrices to Seropositivity (Liverpool UP), as well as a co-edited volume of Yale French Studies, Turns to the Right?. He is currently working on a comparatist volume on nineteenth-century narrative, on the rhetoric of non-reproduction, and a volume on contemporary ‘imaginaries’ relative to the subjective remapping of Paris since 1968.

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Lawrence R. Schehr – ‘Combatting Basophobia: Fictionalised Trauma in Beigbeder’s Windows on the World’

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questions:

Encounters with the monstrous are always memorable and often traumatic. Throughout both literature and history, the figure of the monster functions as an emblem of the other, an unspeakable and unruly presence which is frequently blamed for the physical and emotional wounds  inflicted on both individuals and society. However the nineteenth century’s interest in categorisation and classification coupled with advances in physiognomy and psychiatry and a more enlightened approach to physical difference led writers, thinkers and scientists to look again at the problematic figure of the monster. This seminar will consider the means by which literature, thought and science speak of monsters and what their findings reveal about the monster’s significance. Through readings of various depictions and discussions of the monstrous, we will ask whether encounters with the monstrous are always damaging and dangerous or whether, following assertions by recent ‘Monster Theory’, they can be rethought as significant insights into the representation of human experience and the production of meaning. This seminar will consist of papers by three academics working on different aspects of monstrosity, followed by a round-table discussion. The session has been organised by Dr Hannah Thompson, and will be chaired by Professor Colin Davis.

Dr Hannah Thompson (Royal Holloway),
‘Metaphoric Monsters’

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Dr Miranda Gill (University of Cambridge),
‘Revaluing Monstrosity: The Problem of Shame in the Writing of Jules Vallès’

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Professor Abigail Lee Six (Royal Holloway),
‘Monsters and Monstrosity in Spanish Fiction’

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Venue:

Speaker: Lucille Cairns

Title: ‘Trauma and Testimony: The Case of Myriam Anissimov’

Abstract: As Thomas Nolden has averred, ‘among today’s Jewish writers in France, Myriam Anissimov is the most engaged in reminding the reader of exactly what happened in the past’. Anissimov is by far the most prominent Jewish woman writer in post-WWII France consistently to foreground traumatic postmemory of the Shoah. Born in a Swiss refugee camp in 1943 to Jewish parents whose other family members were slaughtered in the Nazi death camps, Anissimov has commented that ‘je me suis toujours demandé pourquoi, moi, j’ai survécu et pourquoi les autres sont morts. Je me suis demandé aussi si vraiment j’avais le droit d’existence et si je n’étais pas coupable de quelque chose’ (‘I’ve always wondered why I survived and why the others died. I also wondered if I really had the right to exist and whether I wasn’t guilty of something’). Whilst Anissimov’s third novel, Rue de nuit (1977) sets a certain template for her later works, the most recent of which appeared in 2007, the mediation of second-generation symptomatology is complicated by a particular narratological choice that actually demarcates it from the rest of Anissimov’s oeuvre. Whereas most of that oeuvre is largely if not exclusively mimetic, Rue de nuit is cast in an ostensibly realist framework of post-war (early 1970s) Paris, but is in fact a dystopic, oneiric first-person narrative which provokes lectorial oscillation between belief and disbelief. Indeed, it has been justly qualified by celebrated Jewish writer Gilles Pudlowski as ‘très kafkaïen’ (‘very Kafkaesque’). In its exegesis of Rue de nuit, my paper will foreground the strengths of that departure from mimeticism in the forging of post-Auschwitz structures of feeling.

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Lucille Cairns – ‘Trauma and Testimony: The Case of Myriam Anissimov’

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questions:

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handout

speaker:

title: ‘Why Trauma?’

Introductory talk at the first session in the series, 18 November 2009

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