Languages of Trauma: History, Memory, and Media

This volume traces the distinct cultural languages in which individual and collective forms of trauma are expressed in diverse variations, including oral and written narratives, literature, comic strips, photography, theatre, and cinematic images. The central argument is that traumatic memories are frequently beyond the sphere of medical, legal, or state intervention. To address these different, often intertwined modes of language, the contributors provide a variety of disciplinary approaches to foster innovative debates and provoke new insights. Prevailing definitions of trauma can best be understood according to the cultural and historical conditions within which they exist. Languages of Trauma explores what this means in practice by scrutinizing varied historical moments from the First World War onwards and particular cultural contexts from across Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa – striving to help decolonize the traditional Western-centred history of trauma, dissolving it into multifaceted transnational histories of trauma cultures.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Languages of Trauma Peter Leese, Julia Barbara Köhne, and Jason Crouthamel Part One: Words and Images 1. "A perfect hell of a night which we can never forget": Narratives of Trauma in the Private Writings of British and Irish Nurses in the First World War Bridget E. Keown 2. Religious Language in German Soldiers’ Narratives of Traumatic Violence, 1914–1918 Jason Crouthamel 3. Languages of the Wound: Finnish Soldiers’ Bodies as Sites of Shock during World War II Ville Kivimäki 4. Efim Segal Shell-shocked Sergeant: Red Army Veterans and the Expression and Representation of Trauma Memories Robert Dale 5. The Falling Man: Resisting and Resistant Visual Media in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers Jennifer Anderson Bliss Part Two: Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts 6. Performing Songs and Staging Theatre Performances: Working through the Trauma of the 1965 Indonesian Mass Killings Dyah Pitaloka and Hans Pols 7. Encounters with Some Things Are Difficult to Say, Re-Membered Katrina Bugaj 8. Performing Memory in an Interdependent Body Emily Mendelsohn 9. Memory and Trauma: Two Contemporary Art Projects Maj Hasager Part Three: Normalizations of Trauma 10. Between Social Criticism and Epistemological Critique: Critical Theory and the Normalization of Trauma Ulrich Koch 11. The New Normal: Trauma as Successfully Failed Communication in Nurse Betty Thomas Elsaesser 12. The Exploitation of Trauma: (Mis-)Representations of Rape Victims in the War Film Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż Part Four: Representations in Film 13. Translating Individual and Collective Trauma through Horror: The Case of George A. Romero’s Martin Adam Lowenstein 14. Aesthetic Displays of Perpetrators in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing: Post-Atrocity Perpetrator Symptoms, Re-enactments of Violence, and Perpetrator-Victim-Inversions Julia Barbara Köhne 15. Perpetrator Trauma and Current American War Cinema Raya Morag Coda: Climate Trauma Reconsidered E. Ann Kaplan

About the Author :
Peter Leese is an associate professor in the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Jason Crouthamel is a professor in the Department of History at Grand Valley State University. Julia Barbara Köhne is FONTE visiting professor in the Faculty of Culture, Social Sciences and Education at Humboldt-University Berlin.

Review :
"This collection significantly advances trauma studies, a field destined to continue to grow, expand its intellectual purchase and deepen the extent and complexity of its interdisciplinary reach." - Joy Porter, University of Hull (Social History of Medicine)