Alcoff, Linda MartÃn and Laura Gray-Rosendale. “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996. 198-225. Print. Dangers of Confessional Testimony Alcoff and Gray-Rosedale are looking at the ways in which confessional testimonies are often appropriated by hegemonic forces in order…
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…
Foundational Trauma: the sense tha traumatic events in the past may be adopted and internalized in such a way that “recovery” or “getting over it” is seen to “dishonor” the trauma, or as a betrayal to the victims. Thus, the identification with that past experience of trauma becomes foundational in the personal or collective identity.…
You can sprain your ankle. Arterial plaques can construct The blood flow to your heart. But we don’t have sufficient understanding of the brain to describe exactly how emotional trauma leads to cognitive injury. In the past, I thought it possible that PTSD was perhaps and adaptive response to Trumatic environments. The symptoms of restlessness,…
The reason why allegiance become so important in children is that the narrative of the family fundamentally determines how a child (and the parents, too, but certainly the parents) sees his or her own self fitting within the larger framework of adult society. As Alice Miller writes in The Gifted Child, “I had completed two…
I have trouble “trusting” books by Susan Forward and some others because the examples seem rather inflammatory, possibly even exaggerated. But the experiences described are very, very relatable – clearly effective rhetorically due to that sense of interpersonal resonance, but does this also indicate epistemic validity? Is the ethos “real” as in authentic? Or manufactured…
Maurice Stevens points out how trauma has long fallen on gendered and racial lines. The litigious nature of traumatic experience constrains the resulting “in group.” In the past, railroad companies would employ lawyers in the effort to avoid blame by reducing the number of individuals who could be considered injured (CITATION Stevens) – likewise, Euro-Americans have…
