Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” FQS 12.1, Art. 10 (2011). “A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both process and product” (Sec. 1 History). In the history section, Ellis, Adams, and Bochner provide a nice introduction to postmodernism and…
Janice Haaken’s review of Kate Douglas’s Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory indicates that Douglas has interrogated the genre expectations of the childhood autobiography: “Douglas gathers up a rich web of autobiographical writing on childhood trauma to tell a larger cultural tale of the search for an authentic past” (853). “Douglas describes the demand on…
Susannah Radstone points out the following scholars I should look up: Carolyn Steedman and Empathy Theory (23). David Alexander points out that “trauma sites and trauma victims frequently become the objects of voyeuristic, or triumphalist fascination” (23). James Berger, writing about 9/11, indicates that “while some events get labelled traumatic, others, quite patently, do not”…
Radstone indicates that the ethical goals of trauma theory are not entirely unproblematic. At a surface level, the goal of “cultural remembrance” for the “absent presence” is unchallenged: Though trauma analysis is in its early stages of development, its ethical imperatives do appear to have been accepted: trauma analysis positions itself by analogy with the…
Radstone writes that Something else gets lost, too, in trauma theory’s retreat from the significance of unconscious process of memory formation and revision. And emphasis on the centrality of unconscious process to all aspects of psychical life has the effect of reminding readers and analysts of two important aspects of that life. First, a fundamental…
