CALL FOR PAPERS
Trauma and Forgetting
Catastrophe and the Limits of Representation
The editors of Trauma and Forgetting: Catastrophe and the Limits
of Representation invite submissions for a collection of essays which
seeks to explore contemporary literary and theoretical accounts of memory
and trauma, to examine ways of rethinking the relation between the past,
present, and future, and to provide some indications of whether and how
traumatic experience can be worked through.
What is memory? Remembering means recreating a past event. It
means bringing into presence something that has happened but is now
absent. Memory may also be thought of as a storage space, a reservoir and
a treasure-house, as the Romans called it. For Homer, as much as for
Wordsworth, it is the source of inspiration. For Aristotle, as much as in
literary realisms, memory pertains to the experience of events: it is the
state of being affected by a perception, while at the same time it is a
representation of the past recalled after a lapse of time.
There is another aspect of memory besides its being a faculty of
mind, a representational power and a function that can be learned and
improved. Memory is also a cultural category. Gathering the absent as it
puts together the (scattered) past, memory constitutes an individual's and
a collective's relation with the anterior, informs their history, their
tradition, and hence, their identity.
But what if the past event which one has experienced is in some
essential way unexperienceable? What happens with memory when the event
that one is supposed to recall was never a reality in which one could
participate, but a certain kind of reality which excludes or overwhelms
presence, threatening to destroy the self? What, in other words, happens
with the memory of extreme experiences such as genocide, slavery, or
sexual abuse?
In order to foreground the analysis of a different, traumatic
memory, this collection of essays will consider the change of the notion
of memory effected by the recent study of trauma, attempting to think
memory and trauma together. Among some of the issues at stake in
refiguring memory and trauma are - to suggest only a few examples -
various conceptions of ethical relations; conceptions of social, political
and cultural change; relations between identity and narrative, individual
and collective; the status of evidence, truth, history, and
representation; questions of the production of gender, race, and class;
controversies surrounding "false memory," etc.
The collection is further intended to tease out the specific
problems of traumatic experience concerning, for instance, repetition
compulsion, the relationships between trauma, desire, writing, and
language, the ethics of testimony, the narrative construction of identity,
etc.
The editors encourage psychoanalytic, literary, linguistic or
historical elaborations of the topic following recent works on the limits
of language and representation, the specter of subjectivity that emerges
in trauma, and the (im)possibility of knowing trauma. We are, however,
less interested in, for example, applications of Freud to a literary text,
than in an elaboration of what it means to call a work of art a
testimonial to a trauma: What are the ethico-political consequences and
what are the limits of such a reading?, What does one mean by trauma in
this case?, etc.
We especially welcome contributions which will critically engage
the basic, generally accepted notions coming from recent works on trauma
and memory: for instance, Caruth's suggestion that a history can be a
history of trauma; Felman's assertion that contemporary testimonials
reveal a crisis of witnessing; Lanzmann's opinion that it is madness to
attempt to answer the question, Why?; Friedlnder's limits of (historical)
representation; LaCapra's distinction between historical and structural
trauma; Blanchot's writing of the disaster, Derrida's haunting, etc.
Send inquiries or 4,000 - 8,000 word manuscripts (hard copies) and
vitae to both Linda Belau, Department of Comparative Literature, Box 6000,
Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902 (bd27728@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) and
Petar Ramadanovic, Center for the Humanities, 145 Ednam Drive,
Charlottesville, VA 22903-4629 (pr4d@xxxxxxxxxxxx). Deadline: September
15, 1997.
Trauma and Forgetting
Catastrophe and the Limits of Representation
The editors of Trauma and Forgetting: Catastrophe and the Limits
of Representation invite submissions for a collection of essays which
seeks to explore contemporary literary and theoretical accounts of memory
and trauma, to examine ways of rethinking the relation between the past,
present, and future, and to provide some indications of whether and how
traumatic experience can be worked through.
What is memory? Remembering means recreating a past event. It
means bringing into presence something that has happened but is now
absent. Memory may also be thought of as a storage space, a reservoir and
a treasure-house, as the Romans called it. For Homer, as much as for
Wordsworth, it is the source of inspiration. For Aristotle, as much as in
literary realisms, memory pertains to the experience of events: it is the
state of being affected by a perception, while at the same time it is a
representation of the past recalled after a lapse of time.
There is another aspect of memory besides its being a faculty of
mind, a representational power and a function that can be learned and
improved. Memory is also a cultural category. Gathering the absent as it
puts together the (scattered) past, memory constitutes an individual's and
a collective's relation with the anterior, informs their history, their
tradition, and hence, their identity.
But what if the past event which one has experienced is in some
essential way unexperienceable? What happens with memory when the event
that one is supposed to recall was never a reality in which one could
participate, but a certain kind of reality which excludes or overwhelms
presence, threatening to destroy the self? What, in other words, happens
with the memory of extreme experiences such as genocide, slavery, or
sexual abuse?
In order to foreground the analysis of a different, traumatic
memory, this collection of essays will consider the change of the notion
of memory effected by the recent study of trauma, attempting to think
memory and trauma together. Among some of the issues at stake in
refiguring memory and trauma are - to suggest only a few examples -
various conceptions of ethical relations; conceptions of social, political
and cultural change; relations between identity and narrative, individual
and collective; the status of evidence, truth, history, and
representation; questions of the production of gender, race, and class;
controversies surrounding "false memory," etc.
The collection is further intended to tease out the specific
problems of traumatic experience concerning, for instance, repetition
compulsion, the relationships between trauma, desire, writing, and
language, the ethics of testimony, the narrative construction of identity,
etc.
The editors encourage psychoanalytic, literary, linguistic or
historical elaborations of the topic following recent works on the limits
of language and representation, the specter of subjectivity that emerges
in trauma, and the (im)possibility of knowing trauma. We are, however,
less interested in, for example, applications of Freud to a literary text,
than in an elaboration of what it means to call a work of art a
testimonial to a trauma: What are the ethico-political consequences and
what are the limits of such a reading?, What does one mean by trauma in
this case?, etc.
We especially welcome contributions which will critically engage
the basic, generally accepted notions coming from recent works on trauma
and memory: for instance, Caruth's suggestion that a history can be a
history of trauma; Felman's assertion that contemporary testimonials
reveal a crisis of witnessing; Lanzmann's opinion that it is madness to
attempt to answer the question, Why?; Friedlnder's limits of (historical)
representation; LaCapra's distinction between historical and structural
trauma; Blanchot's writing of the disaster, Derrida's haunting, etc.
Send inquiries or 4,000 - 8,000 word manuscripts (hard copies) and
vitae to both Linda Belau, Department of Comparative Literature, Box 6000,
Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902 (bd27728@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) and
Petar Ramadanovic, Center for the Humanities, 145 Ednam Drive,
Charlottesville, VA 22903-4629 (pr4d@xxxxxxxxxxxx). Deadline: September
15, 1997.