In my article on Anne Michaels' fictional work Fugitive Pieces, I introduce the critical concept of liquefaction as thematic leitmotiv that connects psychological, transgenerational trauma to ...large-scale environmental catastrophes (like floods and hurricanes) across time and place, and across international, national and domestic spaces. Through this central trope, I show how psychological post-traumatic healing in Holocaust survivors and geologic post-traumatic healing operate in tandem in the novel, more precisely how the figurative unearthing and working through of traumatic memory across generations parallels the literal unearthing and re-situating of archaeological artefacts across geologic time. The interconnectedness of psychological wounds with geological wounds demonstrates the ethics of nature - a kind of co-healing of persons and places across generations and landscapes (both transgenerational and transhistorical). I also point out the restitutive ethics of nature and maintain that floods manifest themselves as counterhistoric agents able to reveal and restore historic truth through obscuration and disclosure.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In my article on Anne Michaels' fictional work Fugitive Pieces, I introduce the critical concept of liquefaction as thematic leitmotiv that connects psychological, transgenerational trauma to ...large-scale environmental catastrophes (like floods and hurricanes) across time and place, and across international, national and domestic spaces. Through this central trope, I show how psychological post-traumatic healing in Holocaust survivors and geologic post-traumatic healing operate in tandem in the novel, more precisely how the figurative unearthing and working through of traumatic memory across generations parallels the literal unearthing and re-situating of archaeological artefacts across geologic time. The interconnectedness of psychological wounds with geological wounds demonstrates the ethics of nature - a kind of co-healing of persons and places across generations and landscapes (both transgenerational and transhistorical). I also point out the restitutive ethics of nature and maintain that floods manifest themselves as counterhistoric agents able to reveal and restore historic truth through obscuration and disclosure.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In this paper the author draws on Primo Levi's problematic use of biographic narrative techniques by means of a systematic and symbolic co-ordination of a selection of 21 inorganic elements ...pertaining to Mendeleyev's periodic table. By exploring the mechanisms of remembrance and trauma in conjunction with chemistry and the necessities of testimony, the author argues that Primo Levi's collection of vignettes both reaffirms and challenges modern conceptions of autobiography. The author applies the Greek concept of techné to notions of biographic authorship, and shows how work as narrative/linguistic skill, on the one hand, and laboratory work as scientific engagement with material elements, on the other, are combined in the figure of the Holocaust survivor cum writer-scientist in order to negotiate and restore human integrity. The author sustains that Levi's decade-long attempts to alleviate personal trauma are conditioned by this reinstatement of human dignity through science and intellect; essentially, Levi strives to rehabilitate the concept of life itself, so damaged by the event of the Holocaust and equally central to (auto)biographic literature and the domain of chemistry.
René Frölke’s Le beau danger takes on the condition of the survivor-writer Norman Manea and enquires into the potential of experimental media to illustrate his life and work, and thus to engage ...with and perpetuate the memory of affliction. This paper explores the tension between Manea’s autobiographical pieces and his promotional activity as writer via Foucault’s concept of “beau danger” or aesthetic peril, and proposes a transdisciplinary analysis of Manea’s literary reworking of multiple traumas inflicted by the Holocaust, Communist totalitarianism in Romania and trans-Atlantic exile. In it, I argue along with Frölke that empathy and identification with the pain of others is possible by means of slow and direct involvement with Manea’s prose texts and that transmediality is apt to augment and recontextualise the message passed on by literature in an appealing and highly resonant manner.
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