124070 VO Culture, Society and the Media (2022W)

Since the late 1980s, trauma from being merely a psychiatric category has turned into a cultural phenomenon in its own right. Concepts like personal, collective and cultural trauma are ubiquitous the days and for good reasons. Kirby Farrell, for instance, speaks of current Western cultures as post-traumatic cultures and argues that trauma in the Western world is nowadays as strong a trope as the world as stage was during Renaissance times.Taking examples from Film, TV and Comics this lecture highlights and points out how trauma and traumatization turn from psychological and psychoanalytical concepts into socio-cultural and narrative tropes found in different media texts.