Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction

Jaén, Susana Onega; Ganteau, Jean‐Michel

doi:10.1163/9789401200080

Cited by 47 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…In their "Introduction" to the book "Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction" J.-M. Ganteau and S.Onega write "…it is Freud's name that inevitably crops up most often in literature on the subject, with "Moses and Monotheism" (1939) as the most quoted of the texts. Earlier essays like "Thoughts for the Time on War and Death" (1915) and "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (1920) are also widely recognized as having played an essential part in the definition of the psychic trauma as different from and, in principle, unrelated to physical trauma" [Onega (2011); 9].…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Traumatized Consciousness in Lyudmila Rublewskaya`s Novel the Daguerrotype

Sudliankova

2021

Astraea

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With the tragic events of the 20th century investigation of trauma as a psychic phenomenon has acquired paramount importance. It isan interdisciplinary subject involving doctors, psychologists, philosophers, writers. The Lost Generation authors and modernists were the first to address the problem of emotional shocks experienced by their heroes during WWI. Since then trauma, its causes and consequences have been one of the essential thematic components of world literature and, consequently, trauma studies have become an object of scholarly interest in the last decades of the 20th century in various humanitarian spheres. The present article addresses the way the contemporary Belarusian writer Lyudmila Rublewaskaya represents traumatized consciousness in her novel “The Daguerrotype” (2014). The novel draws its title from an old daguerreotype described in it. It was found by two contemporary young people together with a diary recounting the events of the late 19thcentury. The novel consists of two parts called “The Book of the Inner Circle” and “The Book of the Outer Circle” which are set in two interrelated time planes –the late 19th century and our time respectively. Through the intricately interwoven life stories of five personages the writer looks into various kinds of trauma, exposes their reasons, traces their consequences and describes her heroes’ ways of overcoming the mental distress. The traumatic experience of the characters was either due to the socio-political atmosphere in Russia in the late 19th century, or to a combination of a tragic accident, superstition and manipulation, or to a clash of rough force and nobleness. The significance of unveiling a person’s secret through narration for overcoming the traumatic psychic aftermath is illustrated in the novel, too.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Traumatized Consciousness in Lyudmila Rublewskaya`s Novel the Daguerrotype

Sudliankova

2021

Astraea

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“…More recently, Michael Rothberg has compared Benjamin’s anti-linear and relational notion of constellation to the ‘montage’ of the categories of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, which he finds in ‘traumatic realism’ 20 . Traumatic realism is a literary genre aimed at representing the Holocaust, which deploys the characteristic anti-linearity, hybridity and excessiveness of contemporary trauma narratives in general 21 …”

Section: The Postmodernist Turn and The Trauma Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…All you can do is intervene’ 42 . This call for intervention is a call to assume an ethical position and imagine into being a world ruled by love for the Other and for nature as a life-enhancing alternative to our violent, greedy and traumatised world 43 . As Spike puts it with reference to the dropping of the atomic bomb: ‘What happened did happen, but not before it was so powerful an idea that it took shape and form and ripped through the thin skin that separates potential from event’ (Ref.…”

Section: The Ethical Turn and The Shift Towards Holistic Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

The Notion of Paradigm Shift and the Roles of Science and Literature in the Interpretation of Reality

Onega¹

2014

European Review

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Starting from the premise that human knowledge develops in terms of paradigm shifts, the article draws attention to the problems caused by the demise of transcendent knowledge after the Newtonian paradigm shift. By the turn of the twentieth century, the ensuing ideology of endless progress, unfettered by emotional, affective and imaginative knowledge, brought about a split of cognitive cohesion observable in the increase of mental diseases and the birth of psychoanalysis. The trauma paradigm thus initiated an ‘ethical turn’ in the 1990s heralding a wider scientific and academic shift towards the recuperation of holistic knowledge.

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“…The very shorthand of this area of studies as "distant suffering" rather than, say, "televised suffering" or "representations of suffering" is telling for its emphasis on the geographical category of distance rather than technology. Indeed, the global backdrop of witnessing "distant suffering" distinguishes this literature from "trauma studies" in the humanities, which engages with similar issues, such as the fraughtness of representing pain and how texts ethically bear witness to suffering (Onega 2010). And so, the critique here is not specifically about the witness being situated in "the West," but in a West that is assumed to be socially and culturally distant from both the conditions and cultural contexts of non-Western others, and estranged from the experience of suffering itself.…”

Section: The Diversity and Activity Of Witnessesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Witnessing” or “Mediating” Distant Suffering? Ethical Questions across Moments of Text, Production, and Reception

Ong

2012

Television & New Media

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This article identifies that the current literature on “distant suffering” lacks a nuanced account of the relationship between televised representations of suffering and the audiences that encounter these in their everyday lives. Text-centered studies overemphasize how news narratives cause compassion fatigue, while audience-centered studies enumerate audience responses with inadequate references to the textual elements and social factors that shape these responses. While recent theorizations about “media witnessing” have provided a guidepost in thinking about the ethical consequences of showing and seeing suffering in the media, it however obscures the normative from the descriptive and universalizes the experience of the “witness” it speaks about. To address these gaps and develop a holistic approach to examine televised suffering, the article proposes the use of mediation theory to account for the distinct ethical questions that arise from the specific “moments” of mediation and how they should altogether inform the ethical critique of media.

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Ethics and Trauma in Contemporary British Fiction

Cited by 47 publications

References 0 publications

Traumatized Consciousness in Lyudmila Rublewskaya`s Novel the Daguerrotype

Traumatized Consciousness in Lyudmila Rublewskaya`s Novel the Daguerrotype

The Notion of Paradigm Shift and the Roles of Science and Literature in the Interpretation of Reality

“Witnessing” or “Mediating” Distant Suffering? Ethical Questions across Moments of Text, Production, and Reception

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