Melodrama, cinema and trauma

Screen

Volumn 42, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 201-205

  Kaplan, E Ann ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61449354596     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Sigmund Freud, 'Thoughts on war and death' (1915), in Collected Papers, Volume IV, ed. Joan Rivière (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), p. 307
2. In his Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 144
3. Dominick La Capra quotes Eric Santer in Saul Friedlander (ed ), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the 'Final Solution' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), developing a point similar to mine: 'By narrative fetishism I mean the construction and deployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place . . . (It) is the way an inability or refusal to mourn employs traumatic events; it is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and origin of loss elsewhere.'
4. Sigmund Freud, 'Moses and monotheism' (1939). Pelican Freud Library, Volume 13 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)
5. Miriam Hansen, 'Introduction', to Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: the Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. xi
6. Other theorists also argue for literary genres as repeated forms in which a society's past is remembered. For Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, 'genre memory' meant the 'complex dialogue between the sedimented memories of history and nation preserved in genre forms and the alternative narratives of historical experience they bring into relief', Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History (1997), p. 7
7. Kaja Silverman's concept of historical trauma is especially important, since, like Freud, she theorizes cultural trauma as against individual types: By 'historical trauma', Silverman means 'an historical ramification extending far beyond the individual psyche'. Kaja Silverman, Masculinity at the Margins (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p. 55. Such historical trauma depends for its impact on what Silverman (following Jacques Rancière, as Burgoyne points out), calls the 'dominant fiction', namely the 'mechanism' by which society 'tries to institute itself as such on the basis of closure, of the fixation of meaning, of the non-recognition of the infinite play of differences' (p. 54). Historical trauma is what 'interrupt(s) or even deconstitutet(s) what a society assumes to be its master narratives and immanent Necessity' (p. 55)
8. Margot Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999)
9. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness and the Location of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1999)
10. Aimée Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972)
11. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967)
12. In relation to forms for analysis of trauma's impact in cinema, see essays in E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang (eds), Trauma and Modernity:Transnational Cinemas in Historical Perspective (forthcoming)