Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date 6 March 2012
IN 243
Royal Holloway University of London
Egham, Surrey
TW 20 0EX

TRAUMA, FICTION, HISTORY
seminar series

School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Professor Colin Davis (Royal Holloway, University of London):
Traumatic Hermeneutics, Jean Renoir, and the Memory of War

Trauma poses one of the problems of interpretation in a particularly potent form: how can we tell that what we insist on finding is actually present in the interpreted work? As Thomas Elsaesser has put it, ‘If trauma is experienced through its forgetting, its repeated forgetting, then, paradoxically, one of the signs of the presence of trauma is the absence of all signs of it’. Trauma may be most devastatingly present when it is most vehemently denied. This paper sketches some of the methodological problems involved in interpreting trauma, and then looks more closely at some of the later films of the great French director Jean Renoir. After the critical and commercial failure of his masterpiece La Règle du jeu in 1939 and the invasion of France by Germany in 1940, Renoir moved to the US, where he lived for the rest of his life. The 13 films he made after 1940 have never been largely neglected in comparison with his work of the 1930s. Some critics depict Renoir as having abandoned his earlier political interests, now preferring colourful, superficial spectacle to social commentary. The paper suggests that this is a misreading, and that the bright surfaces of Renoir’s later films screen – in the double sense of ‘mask’ and ‘put on display’ – traumatic experiences. Trauma inhabits these films even if it only indirectly disturbs their apparent cheerfulness.

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Event Date 2 December 2011
Royal Holloway University of London
Bedford Square
2 Gower Street
London WC1E 6DP

Event Date: Tuesday 12 October 2010, 5.00 pm
Venue: Royal Holloway, Room WIN 1-05

School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures

TRAUMA, FICTION, HISTORY seminar series

Professor Robert Eaglestone and Professor Dan Stone- Trauma and History: Approaches to the Holocaust

Abstract: How should we write and talk about the Holocaust? Do the facts speak for themselves, or do they defy speech altogether? Does trauma provide a lens which can help us understand the Holocaust or does it confuse an already bewilderingly complex issue? Aiming to go beyond polemical simplifications, two leading scholars from different disciplinary fields will discuss whether it is necessary, possible or even desirable to give clear cut answers to questions such as these.

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Introduction by Colin Davis: .

Professor Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway. For more information, click HERE.

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Professor Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway. For more information, click HERE.

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Trauma Fiction History Series

Event Date: Wednesday 24 March 2010
Royal Holloway, WIN 002

Lawrence R.Schehr – Combatting Basophobia: Fictionalised Trauma in Beigbeder’s Windows on the World

Abstract: Frédéric Beigbeder’s 2003 novel, Windows on the World, is a fictional representation of the events of 11 September 2001 as told through a double narrative, with an American narrator who is trapped with his two sons in one of the towers and a French narrator who is arguably a rhetorical figure of the author. In his novel, Beigbeder recounts the events that are known to one and all, but does so in a search for meaning, sense, and logic that did not necessarily present themselves in the immediate ‘live’ unfurling of the story. In so doing, he develops a work that reflects some of the concerns expressed by French philosophers including Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Virilio, and, at the same time, explores the limits of narrative fiction’s capacities to represent.

About the speaker: Lawrence R. Schehr is Professor of French at the University of Illinois. He works predominantly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative, contemporary literature and culture, and queer theory. Recent books include two volumes from 2009: Subversions of Verisimilitude: Reading Narrative from Balzac to Sartre (Fordham UP) and French Post-Modern Masculinities: From Neuromatrices to Seropositivity (Liverpool UP), as well as a co-edited volume of Yale French Studies, Turns to the Right?. He is currently working on a comparatist volume on nineteenth-century narrative, on the rhetoric of non-reproduction, and a volume on contemporary ‘imaginaries’ relative to the subjective remapping of Paris since 1968.

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Trauma Fiction History Series

Date: 12 March 2010

Nineteenth Century Monsters

‘Nineteenth-Century Monsters’, a round table organised by Dr Hannah Thompson.
Speakers will include Dr Miranda Gill (Cambridge),  and Professor Abigail Lee Six (Royal Holloway).

Encounters with the monstrous are always memorable and often traumatic. Throughout both literature and history, the figure of the monster functions as an emblem of the other, an unspeakable and unruly presence which is frequently blamed for the physical and emotional wounds inflicted on both individuals and society. However the nineteenth century’s interest in categorisation and classification coupled with advances in physiognomy and psychiatry and a more enlightened approach to physical difference led writers, thinkers and scientists to look again at the problematic figure of the monster. This seminar will consider the means by which literature, thought and science speak of monsters and what their findings reveal about the monster’s significance. Through readings of various depictions and discussions of the monstrous, we will ask whether encounters with the monstrous are always damaging and dangerous or whether, following assertions by recent ‘Monster Theory’, they can be rethought as significant insights into the representation of human experience and the production of meaning. This seminar will consist of papers by three academics working on different aspects of monstrosity, followed by a round-table discussion. Recommended reading will be posted here in advance of the seminar.

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Hannah Thompson – Metaphoric Monsters

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Abigail Lee Six – Monsters and Monstrosity in Spanish Fiction

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series website HERE

Date: 18 November 2009

Lucille Cairns (Durham University) – Trauma and Testimony: The Case of Myriam Anissimov

As Thomas Nolden has averred, ‘among today’s Jewish writers in France, Myriam Anissimov is the most engaged in reminding the reader of exactly what happened in the past’. Anissimov is by far the most prominent Jewish woman writer in post-WWII France consistently to foreground traumatic postmemory of the Shoah. Born in a Swiss refugee camp in 1943 to Jewish parents whose other family members were slaughtered in the Nazi death camps, Anissimov has commented that ‘je me suis toujours demandé pourquoi, moi, j’ai survécu et pourquoi les autres sont morts. Je me suis demandé aussi si vraiment j’avais le droit d’existence et si je n’étais pas coupable de quelque chose’ (‘I’ve always wondered why I survived and why the others died. I also wondered if I really had the right to exist and whether I wasn’t guilty of something’). Whilst Anissimov’s third novel, Rue de nuit (1977) sets a certain template for her later works, the most recent of which appeared in 2007, the mediation of second-generation symptomatology is complicated by a particular narratological choice that actually demarcates it from the rest of Anissimov’s oeuvre. Whereas most of that oeuvre is largely if not exclusively mimetic, Rue de nuit is cast in an ostensibly realist framework of post-war (early 1970s) Paris, but is in fact a dystopic, oneiric first-person narrative which provokes lectorial oscillation between belief and disbelief. Indeed, it has been justly qualified by celebrated Jewish writer Gilles Pudlowski as ‘très kafkaïen’ (‘very Kafkaesque’). In its exegesis of Rue de nuit, my paper will foreground the strengths of that departure from mimeticism in the forging of post-Auschwitz structures of feeling.

This is the inaugural event in the ‘Trauma Fiction History’. Colin Davis will introduce the session with a short paper, ‘Why Trauma?’, outlining the significance of trauma studies for work in the Humanities and laying out some of the aims of the series. This will be followed by a paper by Professor Cairns, entitled ‘Trauma and Testimony: The Case of Myriam Anissimov’.

series website HERE

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Colin Davis – Why Trauma

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Lucille Cairns – Trauma and Testimony: The Case of Myriam Anissimov

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