124071 VO Culture, Society and the Media (2016S)

Transnational Trauma and Cultures: Experience, Representation and Resilience

5.00 ECTS (2.00 SWS), SPL 12 - Anglistik

Moodle

Details

max. 450 participants

Language: English

Examination dates

Lecturers

Classes (iCal) - next class is marked with N

Thursday 10.03. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Thursday 17.03. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Thursday 07.04. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Thursday 14.04. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Tuesday 19.04. 20:00 - 22:00 Helene-Richter-Saal UniCampus Hof 8 3G-EG-21
Thursday 21.04. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Thursday 21.04. 20:00 - 22:00 Helene-Richter-Saal UniCampus Hof 8 3G-EG-21
Monday 25.04. 20:00 - 22:00 Helene-Richter-Saal UniCampus Hof 8 3G-EG-21
Wednesday 27.04. 20:00 - 22:00 Helene-Richter-Saal UniCampus Hof 8 3G-EG-21
Thursday 28.04. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Thursday 12.05. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Thursday 19.05. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Thursday 02.06. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Thursday 09.06. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Thursday 16.06. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03
Thursday 23.06. 09:45 - 11:15 Hörsaal C1 UniCampus Hof 2 2G-O1-03

Information

Aims, contents and method of the course

Since the late 1980s, trauma from being merely a psychiatric category has turned into a cultural phenomenon in its own right. 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. Increasingly, we are facing a memory culture obsessed with memory discourses and memorialisation processes. This unprecedented concern with questions of memory have led some critics to speak of a memory mania, the industry of memory consumption and production.

In this lecture we will look at different cross-cultural and trans-national discursive practices of historical trauma: War trauma, the Holocaust, Apartheid South Africa, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We will start by providing a critical genealogy of the term tracing the cultural context that shaped it and a brief history of the concept throughout psychoanalytic discourse: the shaping influence of the hysterical female body, followed by the image of the shell-shocked soldier in WWI and combat fatigue of WWII, up to the official birth of PTSD, which entered the official manual of mental disorders and the official cultural imaginary in 1980. We will then explore the different ways in which this psychiatric concept has been appropriated by political discourses to create hierarchies of trauma, essentialist identities and selective memorial practices from monuments to museums to trauma as fetish and product of consumer culture.

Assessment and permitted materials

Final written test (100%).

Minimum requirements and assessment criteria

This lecture will familiarise students with the history of trauma both as concept and as cultural object; students will learn how to approach different mediations (comics, movies, novels, poems) and representations of traumatic events; students will be asked to read key theoretical texts by Michel Foucault, François Lyotard, Stuart Hall, Cathy Caruth, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Judith Butler and Michael Kimmel.

Examination topics

Participants are expected to read all set texts plus the additional secondary/theoretifcal material provided on the noodle platform; they are also expected to engage in autonomous research, to offer a critical and reflective analysis of texts and concepts.

Reading list

Maus by Art Spiegelman
Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco
Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway
J.M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country
Bessie Head's A Question of Power

Association in the course directory

Studium: BA 612, EC 125, EC 126; BEd 046
Code/Modul: BA07.1, EC Cultural and Regional Studies 1; BEd Modul 10
Lehrinhalt: 12-4070

Last modified: We 09.09.2020 00:22