Wounded: Studies in Literary and Cinematic Trauma.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Wounded: Studies in Literary and Cinematic Trauma" that was published in Humanities

This book examines recent cinematic representations of the traumatic legacies of national and international events and processes. Whilst not ignoring European and Hollywood cinema, it includes studies of films about countries which have been less well-represented in cinematic trauma studies, including Australia, Rwanda, Chile and Iran. Each essay establishes national and international contexts that are relevant to the films considered. All essays also deal with form, whether this means the use of specific techniques to represent certain aspects of trauma or challenges to certain genre conventions to make them more adaptable to the traumatic legacies addressed by directors. The editors argue that the healing processes associated with such legacies can helpfully be studied through the idiom of ‘scar-formation’ rather than event-centred ‘wound-creation’.

Through South Korean filmic and literary texts, this book explores affect and ethics in the healing of historical trauma, as alternatives to the measures of transitional justice in want of national unity. Historians and legal practitioners who deal with transitional justice agree that the relationship between historiography and justice seeking is contested: this book reckons with this question of how much truth-telling from a violent past will lead to healing, forgiving, forgetting and finally overcoming resentment. Nuanced interpretations of South Korean filmic and literary texts are featured, including Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother and literary texts of Han Kang and Ch’oe Yun, whilst also engaging the ethical and political philosophy of Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and others. Also offered is new and extensive research into the hitherto hidden history of thousands of North Korean war orphans who were sent to Eastern European countries for care. Grappling with the evils of history, the films and novels examined herein find their ultimate themes in compassion, hospitality, humility and solidarity of the wounded. Healing Historical Trauma in South Korean Film and Literature will appeal to students and scholars of film, comparative literature, cultural studies and Korean studies more broadly.

Trauma has become a hotly contested topic in literary studies. But interest in trauma is not new; its roots extend to the Romantic period, when novelists and the first psychiatrists influenced each others' investigations of the »wounded mind«. This book looks back to these early attempts to understand trauma, reading a selection of Romantic novels in dialogue with Romantic and contemporary psychiatry. It then carries that dialogue forward to postmodern fiction, examining further how empirical approaches can deepen our theorizations of trauma. Within an interdisciplinary framework, this study reveals fresh insights into the poetics, politics, and ethics of trauma fiction.

An Aesthetics of Injury exposes wounding as a foundational principle of modernism in literature and film. Theorizing the genre of the narrative wound—texts that aim not only to depict but also to inflict injury—Ian Fleishman reveals harm as an essential aesthetic strategy in ten exemplary authors and filmmakers: Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Hélène Cixous, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Werner Schroeter, Michael Haneke, and Quentin Tarantino. Violence in the modernist mode, an ostensible intrusion of raw bodily harm into the artwork, aspires to transcend its own textuality, and yet, as An Aesthetics of Injury establishes, the wound paradoxically remains the essence of inscription. Fleishman thus shows how the wound, once the modernist emblem par excellence of an immediate aesthetic experience, comes to be implicated in a postmodern understanding of reality reduced to ceaseless mediation. In so doing, he demonstrates how what we think of as the most real object, the human body, becomes indistinguishable from its “nonreal” function as text. At stake in this tautological textual model is the heritage of narrative thought: both the narratological workings of these texts (how they tell stories) and the underlying epistemology exposed (whether these narrativists still believe in narrative at all). With fresh and revealing readings of canonical authors and filmmakers seldom treated alongside one another, An Aesthetics of Injury is important reading for scholars working on literary or cinematic modernism and the postmodern, philosophy, narratology, body culture studies, queer and gender studies, trauma studies, and cultural theory.

In the last decade, the question of how trauma is remembered and narrated has become increasingly crucial in literary studies and in psychotherapy. Writing Wounds rethinks the relation between trauma, memory and narrative through readings of key fictional, autobiographical and "autofictional" texts by recent French women writers: Marie Cardinal, Chantal Chawaf, Hélène Cixous, Charlotte Delbo, Béatrice de Jurquet and Sarah Kofman. By drawing on and also interrogating recent theories of trauma, this study shows that trauma is inscribed in writing through recurring images of the body and of bodily wounding that mark the limits and possibilities of narrativisation. This book has a double aim: to offer new readings of texts by modern French women writers and to rethink the crucial question of how narratives of trauma are to be read. Writing Wounds will be of interest to researchers working on trauma, modern French literature, women's writing or "life-writing" as well as to a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on trauma and narrative.