Trauma, Temporality, and Testimony in Carolivia Herron’s "Thereafter Johnnie"

This paper explores trauma in Carolivia Herron’s 'Thereafter Johnnie', which investigates the potential emancipation of the traumatized gendered and racialized daughter’s body from a nation-state born from a system of patriarchy and racism by conceiving of its apocalyptic demise and the birth of a new state through an the discourse of incest, paralleling present-day violations with the historical institution of slavery. Placing contemporary literary trauma theories in relation to African American literary criticism, this paper suggests that the black daughter’s body becomes a site of conflict between linear or historical and traumatic time, where trauma is encoded through violence, revealing a form of counter-historical temporality linked to corporeity as a form of corporeal testimony

Writing trauma, writing time and space : Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and the Lear group of father-daughter incest narratives

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From Mobile Crimes to Crimes of Mobility

Piipponen, Mäntymäki and Rodi-Risberg suggest that many contemporary crime narratives across the globe host a heightened interest in diverse and ambiguous mobilities, border crossings and borderlands. They propose that such mobilities and crossings reflect on recent sociocultural developments on local and global levels and communicate specific geopolitical anxieties. They position their own mobilities research perspective within existing crime fiction scholarship, especially within the so-called transnational and spatial turns. Introducing some key observations of mobilities research, they suggest that mobility can be considered both as an object of study in its own right and a critical lens through which contemporary crime narratives can be examined. The chapter identifies several key areas where crime texts engage with types and practices of mobility to offer social critique: crimes across borders and global flows of capital; the means for expanding and curtailing human mobility; and generic exchange and especially the mobilisation of affect through genre hybridisation.Peer reviewe

El Capitán as a site for male healing from trauma in Jeff Long’s "The wall" and Tommy Caldwell’s "The push"

Nature and mountains are often represented as places of healing in literature and the media, especially for white, healthy, and middleclass men. However, discussions on nature and gender in relation to trauma are rare, and a specific discussion on the representation of male mountain climbers’ traumas is missing. In this article, we are interested in how nature, particularly the famous mountain El Capitan, is represented in Jeff Long’s novel “The Wall” (2006) and Tommy Caldwell’s memoir “The Push” (2017) as a specific spatial location of healing for male rock climbers, who at the same time are both victims of traumatic events and partially responsible for the development of those events. More specifically, this article places ecofeminist and ecological masculinities scholarship in dialog with trauma studies and analyzes these texts with the aim of showing how representations of trauma relate to those of nature and masculinity. In this analysis, questions of how certain aspects of ecological and hegemonic masculinities relate to representing trauma, nature, and masculinity are central, as are issues of perpetrator trauma and the non-generic character of traumatic experience. Ultimately, we show how representations of nature, trauma, and masculinities in the primary texts converge and reflect a plurality of gendered responses to trauma and healing in nature.La naturaleza y las montañas se presentan a menudo como lugares de curación en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación, especialmente para los hombres blancos, sanos y de clase media. Sin embargo, las discusiones sobre la naturaleza y el género en relación con el trauma son escasas, y falta una discusión específica sobre la representación de los traumas masculinos de los montañistas. En este artículo, estamos interesados en cómo la naturaleza, particularmente la famosa montaña El Capitán, está representada en la novela “The Wall” (2006) de Jeff Long y en la memoria “The Push” (2017) de Tommy Caldwell como una ubicación espacial específica de curación para escaladores masculinos, quienes son simultáneamente víctimas de eventos traumáticos y parcialmente responsables del desarrollo de esos eventos. Más específicamente, este artículo coloca en un diálogo el ecofeminismo y las masculinidades ecológicas con estudios de trauma, y analiza estos textos mostrando cómo las representaciones del trauma se relacionan con las de la naturaleza y la masculinidad. En este análisis, las preguntas sobre cómo ciertos aspectos de las masculinidades ecológicas y hegemónicas se relacionan con la representación del trauma, la naturaleza y la masculinidad son fundamentales, como lo son las cuestiones del trauma del perpetrador y el carácter no genérico de la experiencia traumática. En última instancia, mostramos cómo las representaciones de la naturaleza, el trauma y las masculinidades en los textos primarios convergen y reflejan una pluralidad de respuestas de género al trauma y la curación en la naturaleza

Betrayal Trauma in Jane Smiley's Novel A Thousand Acres

Avhandlingen granskar upplevelsen av trauma så som det upplevs av huvudpersonen Ginny i Jane Smileys roman A Thousand Acres. Romanen är en omarbetning av William Shakespeares King Lear från äldsta dottern Gonerills perspektiv. Smileys Gonerill, Ginny, har som vuxen inget medvetet minne av att hon som tonåring blivit sexuellt utnyttjad av sin far. Som teoretisk bakgrund används Jennifer J. Freyds Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Freyds teori hävdar att ett barns minnesförlust av sexuella övergrepp som begåtts av förälder eller ansvarig vårdnadshavare är logisk och garanterar barnets överlevnad. Den primära motivationen för ett barns minnesförlust är undvikande av information som hotar ett nödvändigt förhållande av kärlek och omvårdnad. Resultatet av analysen visar att den huvudsakliga orsaken till Ginnys minnesförlust är undvikande av information som skulle ha hotat hennes nödvändiga förhållande till fadern. Dissociation och splitting används av Ginny för att glömma övergreppet och de signaler som till slut utlöser hennes traumatiska minne är: tonårsflickor i hennes nuvarande liv, en kärleksaffär, hennes systers redogörelse för händelsen och ett besök till platsen där övergreppet ägt rum.fi=Kokotekstiversiota ei ole saatavissa.|en=Fulltext not available.|sv=Fulltext ej tillgänglig

Trauma and storytelling in Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon

The dominant understanding of trauma as an epistemological crisis that can be mimetically passed on to readers has in the twenty-first century been criticized for its apolitical and ahistorical orientations. As a way to assess this criticism, this article examines trauma and storytelling in Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon (1994), a novel which places the trauma of sexual violence in a broader context of settler colonialism. Reading the novel in dialog with American Indian studies and research on the writings of women of color offers an exploration of key aspects of trauma theory, such as the notions of unrepresentability, punctuality, transmissibility, belatedness, and passive witnessing. Ultimately, the novel not only anticipates today’s increased mainstream recognition of gender violence against indigenous women, but serves as a potential harbinger of future political action through politically engaged reading.peerReviewe

Problems in Representing Trauma

peerReviewe

El Capitán como espacio de curación masculina del trauma en The Wall de Jeff Long y The Push de Tommy Caldwell

Abstract          Nature and mountains are often represented as places of healing in literature and the media, especially for white, healthy, and middleclass men. However, discussions on nature and gender in relation to trauma are rare, and a specific discussion on the representation of male mountain climbers’ traumas is missing. In this article, we are interested in how nature, particularly the famous mountain El Capitan, is represented in Jeff Long’s novel The Wall (2006) and Tommy Caldwell’s memoir The Push (2017) as a specific spatial location of healing for male rock climbers, who at the same time are both victims of traumatic events and partially responsible for the development of those events. More specifically, this article places ecofeminist and ecological masculinities scholarship in dialog with trauma studies and analyzes these texts with the aim of showing how representations of trauma relate to those of nature and masculinity. In this analysis, questions of how certain aspects of ecological and hegemonic masculinities relate to representing trauma, nature, and masculinity are central, as are issues of perpetrator trauma and the non-generic character of traumatic experience. Ultimately, we show how representations of nature, trauma, and masculinities in the primary texts converge and reflect a plurality of gendered responses to trauma and healing in nature.Resumen      La naturaleza y las montañas se presentan a menudo como lugares de curación en la literatura y en los medios de comunicación, especialmente para los hombres blancos, sanos y de clase media. Sin embargo, las discusiones sobre la naturaleza y el género en relación con el trauma son escasas, y falta una discusión específica sobre la representación de los traumas masculinos de los montañistas. En este artículo, estamos interesados en cómo la naturaleza, particularmente la famosa montaña El Capitán, está representada en la novela The Wall (2006) de Jeff Long y en la memoria The Push (2017) de Tommy Caldwell como una ubicación espacial específica de curación para escaladores masculinos, quienes son simultáneamente víctimas de eventos traumáticos y parcialmente responsables del desarrollo de esos eventos. Más específicamente, este artículo coloca en un diálogo el ecofeminismo y las masculinidades ecológicas con estudios de trauma, y analiza estos textos mostrando cómo las representaciones de ltrauma se relacionan con las de la naturaleza y la masculinidad. En este análisis, las preguntas sobre cómo ciertos aspectos de las masculinidades ecológicas y hegemónicas se relacionan con la representación del trauma, la naturaleza y la masculinidad son fundamentales, como lo son las cuestiones del trauma del perpetrador y el carácter no genérico de la experiencia traumática. En última instancia, mostramos cómo las representaciones de la naturaleza, el trauma y las masculinidades en los textos primarios convergen y reflejan una pluralidad de respuestas de género al trauma y la curación en la naturaleza

El Capitan as a Site for Male Healing from Trauma in Jeff Long’s The Wall and Tommy Caldwell’s The Push

Nature and mountains are often represented as places of healing in literature and the media, especially for white, healthy, and middleclass men. However, discussions on nature and gender in relation to trauma are rare, and a specific discussion on the representation of male mountain climbers’ traumas is missing. In this article, we are interested in how nature, particularly the famous mountain El Capitan, is represented in Jeff Long’s novel The Wall (2006) and Tommy Caldwell’s memoir The Push (2017) as a specific spatial location of healing for male rock climbers, who at the same time are both victims of traumatic events and partially responsible for the development of those events. More specifically, this article places ecofeminist and ecological masculinities scholarship in dialog with trauma studies and analyzes these texts with the aim of showing how representations of trauma relate to those of nature and masculinity. In this analysis, questions of how certain aspects of ecological and hegemonic masculinities relate to representing trauma, nature, and masculinity are central, as are issues of perpetrator trauma and the non-generic character of traumatic experience. Ultimately, we show how representations of nature, trauma, and masculinities in the primary texts converge and reflect a plurality of gendered responses to trauma and healing in nature.peerReviewe

Perpetrator Trauma in Television Crime Series We Hunt Together

Crime fiction scholarship increasingly focuses on trauma in contemporary crime narratives but has largely neglected to investigate perpetrator trauma. This article contributes to filling this gap by exploring perpetrator trauma in We Hunt Together (2020), a British television crime series written by Gaby Hull, that portrays the consequences of perpetrator trauma on a former child soldier from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Babeni (Baba) Lenga, waiting for permanent residency in the UK. Viewers learn about his violent past through flashbacks and his involvement with Frederica ‘Freddy’ Lane which precipitates Baba’s present return to violence. Informed by crime fiction studies, literary trauma theory, and research on child soldier narratives, this study argues that perpetrator trauma complicates and renders agency ambiguous in We Hunt Together, where Baba’s story eventually leads to healing. Ultimately, the perpetrator trauma narrative of a former child soldier, focalised through Baba, brings together the themes of war, colonialism, and the growing use of child soldiers in the present, challenging the crime-solving plot by raising ethical and political issues of guilt and responsibility and problematising any easy distinctions between victim and perpetrator/criminal.peerReviewe