Trauma and Cultural Memory Studies

Abstract

Trauma theory and cultural memory studies intersect, but do not necessarily converge, in their shared concern with the remembrance of traumatic histories and events. A fundamental value of trauma theory was its re-working and energizing of familiar concepts such as testimony and witness, which it brought together with newer concepts such as trauma. Together, these seeded novel analytic frameworks which provided new insights into the construction and transmission of traumatic memory in cultural texts. For instance, the notion that trauma is manifested belatedly provides the premise for Ari Folman’s autobiographical film, Waltz with Bashir. The origins of the discourse of trauma are typically traced back to the diagnosis of nervous disorders in the nineteenth century such as “railway spine”. Trauma theorists in the 1990s drew on psychoanalysis and deconstruction to develop novel approaches to studying the ongoing effects of difficult histories in the present, with a focus on how they were remembered, represented and transmitted via cultural texts. Show more