Trauma Narratives Research Articles

Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma ed. by Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni (review)

Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma ed. by Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni (review)

회상, 재구성, 치유 － 『눈 사냥꾼들』 속 트라우마 서사

회상, 재구성, 치유 － 『눈 사냥꾼들』 속 트라우마 서사

Rupture of Body and Mind in Hiroshima Mon Amour:

Alain Resnais has devised a narrative of fractured identity, trauma, and incommunicability in Hiroshima Mon Amour. With its minimal aesthetics, intricate movement and jettisoned conventionality, the film becomes a new map for theorizations in literary, cultural, and psychoanalytic spaces. This study uses these spaces for a phenomenological inquisition of “rupture” by positioning the subjects of the narrative within them, thus creating a spectrum for identity analysis as well. By delineating the characters as fragments and totalities, it strives to provide a critical reading of trauma and the separation it postulates in the corporeal identity. Kristevan conceptualizations of “abject” and “melancholia,” Freudo-Lacanian postulation of “spatial geometry,” and Kantian “spatiality” are used as modalities for the demarcation of new narratives within literary, social,cultural, and epistemological dialectics. The study further aims to structuralize rupture as generating new cartographies of spatiality while hinging on the film’s narrative framework of storytelling through the body and the mind.

Trauma, Haunting, and Representation: Rereading and the Translation Examination of Kokoro

The Japanese novel, Kokoro (1914), offers a profound insight into early 20th-century Japanese society encompassing history, politics, and literature. Although this novel has been extensively explored in literary and translation studies, the convergence remains underexplored. This study advocates integrating literary criticism with translation practice for a more faithful representation of narratives. Applying trauma/PTSD studies theory, it meticulously analyzes Kokoro, particularly examining the English and Chinese renditions of the pivotal term “談判 (danpan; negotiation)”. The methodology involves constructing a trilingual database, incorporating the Japanese source text and seven translations in English and Chinese. By scrutinizing specific passages, the study delves into trauma-related responses and behaviors, revealing their impact on long-lasting changes in personality and relationships. Emphasis is placed on the translation of key terms, preserving cultural and linguistic nuances. This innovative approach advances both literary criticism and translation theory, emphasizing psychological elements for a nuanced portrayal of characters’ states of mind. The study underscores the significance of trauma narratives in comprehending personal and historical traumas, asserting that translators of trauma literature must blend theoretical knowledge with social responsibility. They serve as “secondary witnesses,” entrusted with accurately transmitting traumatic stories between languages, fostering empathy, and preventing the repetition of tragedies in history. This approach provides an innovative interpretation of Kokoro and its translations, bridging the realms of literary criticism and translation studies.

Supervisory Alliance as a Moderator of the Effects of Behavioral Rehearsal on TF-CBT Fidelity: Results from a Randomized Trial of Supervision Strategies.

Exposure is an important element of treatment for many evidence-based treatments but can be challenging to implement. Supervision strategies to support exposure delivery may be an important tool to facilitate the use of exposure techniques; however, they must be considered and used in the context of the supervisory alliance. The present study examined relations between supervisory alliance and fidelity to the trauma narrative (TN; i.e., imaginal exposure) component of Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. We also examined how supervisory alliance moderated the effect of behavioral rehearsal use in supervision on TN fidelity. We analyzed data from a randomized controlled trial, in which forty-two supervisors and their clinicians (N = 124) from 28 Washington State community-based mental health offices participated. Clinicians were randomized to receive one of two supervision conditions-symptom and fidelity monitoring (SFM) or SFM with behavioral rehearsal (SFM + BR). Supervisory alliance alone did not predict delivery (i.e., occurrence) or extensiveness of delivery of the trauma narrative. Client-focused supervisory alliance moderated the effectiveness of behavioral rehearsal-as client-focused alliance increased, the odds of delivering the TN also increased significantly. Future research should further investigate how to appropriately match supervision techniques with supervisory dyads and explore the interplay of alliance with supervision techniques a supervisor might employ.

Translating Trauma Narratives: The Case of Sepetys’ Novel “Between Shades of Gray” and Its Cinematic Adaptation Titled “Ashes in the Snow” by Markevicius (2018)

The twentieth century witnessed an abundant number of traumatic events related to dark history, like exiles and repressions by the Soviet regime in Lithuania in 1940-1953. In a single week of June 1941, the Soviets exiled 2% of the entire Lithuania’s population, while the total number reached nearly 14%. At the time, when it was allowed to speak about the unspeakable events of travelling to and surviving imprisonment in different concentration camps, numerous important works of various genres were published. The first historical novel in English - Between Shades of Gray - was written in 2011 by Ruta Sepetys, the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee. The novel was translated into 30 languages. In 2018 Marius A. Markevicius adapted the novel into a film titled “Ashes in the Snow.” The aim of the research is to discuss trauma and its reflection in literature and cinema, focusing on translation as screen adaptation. The novelty of the paper lies in the topic of (re)focalization when dealing with screen adaptation in relation to collective or personal traumas embodied in literary works. The concepts of conventional translation and adaptational translation by Henrik Gotlieb (2017: 52) are also discussed. The analysis of trauma is based on Cathy Caruth’s ideas who defines traumatic memories as non-verbal, so filmmakers have to find a way to express trauma when language becomes inaccessible and inadequate (Caruth 1996: 3-6). Gerard Genette’s three types of focalization, - zero, internal and external, - as well as visible and invisible narrator in the story, offer a new approach to the study of audiovisual translation from the perspective of screen adaptation according to the external and internal position of the focalizer in the narrative: perceptual, psychological and ideological.

The Missing Person in a Story about Kashmir: A Reading of Madhuri Vijay’s <i>The Far Field </i>

This article examines the trope of the ‘missing person’ in the literature about Kashmir and argues, by taking Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field (2019) as an example, how the trope allows the examination of a multilayered history of violence. The article problematises the idea of visibility and invisibility of the missing/abducted/hidden/underground people during conflict and suggests that these figures can be read as metaphors for personal and collective trauma and loss. By triangulating three coordinates in Kashmiri context – violence, trauma, and invisibility – the essay argues that a missing person can be emblematic of memories of trauma, negation of humanity, violation of body, and public complicity in institutional violence. By foregrounding Shalini’s journey to recover the missing people, the novel underpins the “rot remains” of a society afflicted with violence and state apathy. Within the framework of trauma theory in the postcolonial context, the essay shows how the focus of Vijay’s narrative of Kashmiri people’s trauma is shifted from speech to body. The emphasis on the body contributes to a compelling narration of trauma by conflating land and people.

Navigating the Shadows: Narratives of Trauma and Disability in Lisa Genova’s Novel “Still Alice”

The pragmatic illustration of the protagonist suffering from a rare neurological diseases in Lisa Genova’s novel Still Alice provides an ideal perspective for studying the psychological trauma in pathological fiction, a subset of science fiction. The novel is not intended as a “cure” or a success story, but primarily a aid in dealing with memory loss, orientation and family relationships inevitable. This research article presents a new analysis of trauma related to “neurological” genre, followed by an analysis of the narrative and literary techniques used by the author to illustrate the traumatic episodes in her novel. The analysis provide a science fiction writers especially to those interested in medical and literature, the opportunity to portray trauma more accurately in their work. It will further broaden the scope of phenomology, narrative theory and genre and criticism in literary studies.

The people of Chernobyl: a community of loss in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Chernobyl Prayer

Svetlana Aleksievich conducted hundreds of interviews with those affected by the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine and her native Belarus and assembled them in her 1997 novel Chernobyl Prayer. A Chronicle of the Future. Aleksievich, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, created a complex, polyphonic blend of oral history and literature and provided a fragmentated and diverse narrative of memory, trauma, and victimhood. The article examines Aleksievich’s rendition of the ways in which “the people of Chernobyl” convey their own understanding of this identity. The many voices of Aleksievich’s novel coalesce to speak for what Serguei Oushakine calls a community of loss. The article traces the articulation of their identity: from the frustrated search for appropriate discursive tools and points of reference, to the explicit sense of having formed a unique social entity, a community. This transition is also a progression, through the process of articulation and analysis, from a negative identity, defined by loss and a radical change in status, to one enhanced by philosophical and environmental awareness. This is also a shift from the mainstream Soviet worldview and identity to other more complex, albeit less comforting perspectives.

Rethinking the apocalypse: Zeno’s Conscience and Death Stranding

ABSTRACT The moment we live in is a moment of multiple crisis – environmental, political, economic, and viral – a moment, that is, where the reality of damage, fallibility and faultiness, and the ensuing fear, anxiety, rage, trauma, protest, and mobilisation have reached a critical point. Past and present narratives of crisis and trauma can help navigate this process. In this article we have chosen to focus on Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (1923) and Hideo Kojima’s videogame Death Stranding (2019) for several reasons. The most important of all are Svevo’s and Kojima’s choices to deal with the trauma of crisis by emphasising and investigating the process leading to crisis, and of focusing on the zone in-between the ‘normal’ and the unknown. In so doing both narratives underscore the significance of ruins, desolation and the broken as a backdrop for rediscovering everyday life and forging meaningful connections in a fragmented world.

Literature of testimony between oblivion and deliberate omission

Prison camp texts constitute a very important stratum of 20th-c. literature. On their way to the reader, they overcome the barriers of fear and reluctance to immerse oneself into a complex and traumatic narrative, a recurrent risk of oblivion, and repeated suppression by censorship — on behalf of the authorities and educational institutions as well as society in general. Russian and Polish literature about gulags not only shares the same trauma and publication destiny, but also common topics, methods, and approaches to describing the unutterable experience. Two writers that embody this process — Herling-Grudziński and Shalamov — never met in person, but succeeded in conveying essential messages to the reader about the destructive and corrupting effect of a prison camp, the senselessness of forced labour, and the dehumanization and degradation of a person trapped in such an environment. The literary dialogue between the two authors contains a powerful system of reference for the study of 20th-c. Polish and Russian prison camp prose.

Neural patterns differentiate traumatic from sad autobiographical memories in PTSD.

For people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), recall of traumatic memories often displays as intrusions that differ profoundly from processing of 'regular' negative memories. These mnemonic features fueled theories speculating a unique cognitive state linked with traumatic memories. Yet, to date, little empirical evidence supports this view. Here we examined neural activity of patients with PTSD who were listening to narratives depicting their own memories. An intersubject representational similarity analysis of cross-subject semantic content and neural patterns revealed a differentiation in hippocampal representation by narrative type: semantically similar, sad autobiographical memories elicited similar neural representations across participants. By contrast, within the same individuals, semantically similar trauma memories were not represented similarly. Furthermore, we were able to decode memory type from hippocampal multivoxel patterns. Finally, individual symptom severity modulated semantic representation of the traumatic narratives in the posterior cingulate cortex. Taken together, these findings suggest that traumatic memories are an alternative cognitive entity that deviates from memory per se.

Listening to other people's traumatic experiences: What makes it hard and what could protect professionals from developing related distress? A qualitative investigation.

Listening to people talk about their trauma experiences involves indirect exposure to trauma (IET) and can trigger emotional distress. Existing studies about the risk factors for post-IET distress have methodological limitations and reported inconsistent results, making their findings difficult to meaningfully synthesise. Also, most of them did not focus explicitly on trauma narratives and did not explore qualitatively the opinions and experiences of professionals who work closely with trauma survivors. The present study involved 36 professionals who worked with trauma survivors and used a qualitative design to investigate: (a) the perceived impact of the survivors' accounts, (b) the factors they deemed as important to be psychologically prepared for trauma accounts, and (c) their strategies for coping with IET. The semi-structured interviews conducted yielded rich data that was analysed thematically and organised in 13 subordinate themes, and 4 master themes. Listening to trauma narratives was thought to lead to emotional distress when it challenges the listener's 'basic assumptions' of safety and justice, when the listener has reduced sense of control and operates outside their 'window of tolerance', when empathic responses are too strong, and psychological preparedness for trauma-narratives is perceived as insufficient. Recommendations for future research and implications for practice are discussed.

The Future: Missing Children, Time Travel, and Post-Nuclear Apocalypse in the Dark Series (Netflix)

The concept of the post-apocalypse, a cultural imagination of nuclear energy, the temporality of trauma, and time travel are linked herein in order to arrive at a political reading of the Dark series. This show is a commentary on the phasing out of nuclear power in Germany in response to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Two readings of this series are proposed: a meditation on the possible futures of the world (the possibility of reparative action and the post-apocalypse) and a traumatic narrative (the concepts of trauma and loss are crucial to understanding the plot, while both the visuals and the plot borrow from posttraumatic cinema). Nevertheless, the series plays by the rules of popular trauma culture, rules whereby a tragedy suffered by others serves the economic interests of the media.

Storiez with Urban Youth: The Evolution of a Trauma Narrative Intervention

Storiez with Urban Youth: The Evolution of a Trauma Narrative Intervention

Popular historical films as collective memory-work in Eastern Europe: from Polish KATYN to Romanian AFERIM! and Hungarian BET ON REVENGE

Abstract Historical film – a film genre supported in the Cold War era – has re-emerged in the 21st century in Eastern European cinemas, its success signalled by popularity, dedicated state financing funds or political support. This article frames the phenomenon within the Assmannian model of three communicative generations, suggested to be interlinked on the level of both the creative staff and the audience of Eastern European historical films. Based on box-office data of the Lumiere Database of the European Audiovisual Observatory, and research referring to further elements of canonization, it is argued that titles such as Polish Katyn (2007), Romanian Aferim! (2015) or Hungarian Bet on Revenge (2016) – the first majority production historical films to achieve significant audience, and, consequently, critical success in their domestic markets in the 21st century – signal a successful collective memory-work process. While in the major Polish market this may be inscribed within the three communicative generations of the victims, the forgetters and the mourners doing memory-work – possibly processing collective traumatization too –, the two small national examples fall outside the validity of the Assmannian model. In order to somewhat refine this apparent opposition between 21st century Eastern European major and small national collective memory-work through historical films, further examples from the Polish, Hungarian and Romanian top lists are examined. Poetic-medial features – the actualization of “trauma narratives” (Alexander 2012) or of postmodern irony, the employment of cinematic and/or televisual visuality – seem to facilitate collective memory-work differently for major and small national domestic audiences, activating or not their belonging to the three communicative generations with respect to the historical events represented in the films.

“I Just Stopped Being Able to Express the Want:” Trauma and Body Narratives in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

“I Just Stopped Being Able to Express the Want:” Trauma and Body Narratives in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

当代非裔女性自传中的创伤书写

In the autobiography ‘I Know Why Caged Birds Sing’, Maya Angelo reshapes and integrates the history of black trauma by narrating individual and collective trauma, witnessing her traumatic memory and achieving a certain degree of healing. Angelo’s trauma narrative in this autobiography not only vividly and profoundly portrays the trauma suffered by African American women, but also highlights the idea that only by reconstructing their own African American female subjectivity can trauma healing be ultimately achieved.

Traumatic narrative of the pemberontakan PKI Madiun 1948 in the Ayat-Ayat yang Disembelih by Anaf Afifi and Thowaf Zuharon: A postmemory study

This paper attempts to dismantle the pattern of trauma narratives developed in Indonesian literature by the second generation of the Pemberontakan PKI Madiun 1948. This second generation carries an Islamic narrative that is opposed to Communism. The narrative position of the Pemberontakan PKI Madiun 1948 is different from the G30S PKI 1965, in which the first PKI was the perpetrator, and the second PKI was the victim. The trauma narrative appears in the Ayat-Ayat yang Disembelih (2015) biography by Anaf Afifi and Thowaf Zuharon. The second generation lacks direct memory, which in Marianne Hirsch’s view, is postmemory. Accordingly, the theory used in this paper is Hirsch's postmemory, which believes that the second generation inherits trauma through investment in imagination, projection, and creation. The analytical method used is the methodological implications of postmemory theory with qualitative data. The pattern of the trauma narrative that emerges from the Islamic narrative to the PKI is; reflexive secondary first-person and mental transmission.

Beyond Choice: Reading Sigmund Freud at the End of Roe

After Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, pregnant people lost their Constitutional protection of abortion. The new, visible politics of susceptibility have invited a revisitation to the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud. This article examines the trauma narrative of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the theory of the death drive in elaborating the enduring cultural investment in protecting fetal life while examining its implications for pregnant subjects.