Because Elisa Esposito moves from a position of silent victimization to one of agency, her development can be illuminated through an analogy to Bertha Pappenheim, the first patient of psychoanalysis. ......the connection of Roh's coinage of the term with current literary criticism has been questioned by recent scholars. More broadly, the viewer who is old enough to remember 1962 will recognize the clothing, the hairstyles, the makeup, the period-appropriate props, the advertising billboards on the highway, the cars-most strikingly, the brand-new teal-colored Cadillac Strickland buys-and even the references to television shows such as Bonanza. A character in The Shape of Water mentions missiles being sent into Cuba, and during Giles's abduction of the creature from the laboratory, we hear the voice-over of an actual broadcast from President John F. Kennedy, with a warning about the Russian threat and a plea to Khrushchev. ...the future," that watchword of the decade, aimed as it was at the moon, is invoked again and again:
Radical alienation between family members, addictions of all kinds, child and spousal abuse, child molestation and parentchild incest, sibling incest, loss of one's child or parent, suicide, and ...murder-all in the family. Because the number of American films dealing with family trauma appears to have increased during the 1990s and especially around 2000, I focus on the millennium. In the runaway hit Little Miss Sunshine, several kinds of potentially traumatic experience are tweaked into comedy, representing a high degree of displacement; The War Zone, with its disturbingly graphic scenes of father-daughter incest, contains very little displacement. Because so much of family trauma cinema is concerned with ferreting out and revealing the origins of the trauma at the root of the respective film, the structure of these films often resembles the psychoanalytic process. Where the two films differ is in their radically dissimilar constructions of time. Because narration is so important in representing trauma, the dissociation or repression that often accompanies it, and the process of remembering it, the element of time is crucial in trauma cinema. Whereas Mystic River proceeds in a linear fashion in its excavation and revelation of childhood trauma, in 21 Grams the trauma occurs in the film's present, and the repercussions of the trauma radiate out through the film's fragmented, scrambled structure, forcing viewers to make sense of the action.
Before considering the direction which the next generation of comparatists is likely to take, it will be helpful to contextualize those thoughts by briefly retracing several key moments in the ...history of the discipline of comparative literature since the Second World War. Chronologically, the movement from literary history to cultural studies is steadily in the direction of increasing disciplinary eclecticism. Finney discusses some thoughts about the future of comparative literature.
