Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe

Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe
Author: Simona Mitroiu
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319968335

This volume explores the different mechanisms and forms of expression used by women to come to terms with the past, focusing on the variety and complexity of women’s narratives of displacement within the context of Central and Eastern Europe. The first part addresses the quest for personal (post)memory from the perspective of the second and third generations. The touching collaboration established in reconstructing individual and family (post)memories offers invaluable insights into the effects of displacement, coping mechanisms, and resilience. Adopting the idea that the text itself becomes a site of (post)memory, the second part of the volume brings into discussion different sites and develops further this topic in relation to the creative process and visual text. The last part questions the past in relation to trauma and identity displacement in the countries where abusive regimes destroyed social bonds and had a lasting impact on the people lives.

Displacement and (Post)memory in Post-Soviet Women’s Writing

Displacement and (Post)memory in Post-Soviet Women’s Writing
Author: Marja Sorvari
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2022-04-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 303095837X

The book examines prominent literary works from the past two decades by Russian women writers dealing with the Soviet past. It explores works such as Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Ludmilla Ulitskaya, The Time of Women by Elena Chizhova, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, and In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, and uncovers connecting thematic structures and features. Focusing on the concepts of displacement and postmemory, the book shows how these works have given voice to those on the margins of society and of ‘great history’ whose resistance was often silent. In doing so, these women writers portray the everyday experiences and trauma of displaced women and girls during the second half of the twentieth century. This study offers new insights into the importance of these women writers’ work in creating and preserving cultural memory in post-Soviet Russia.

Women's Life Writing in Post-Communist Romania

Women's Life Writing in Post-Communist Romania
Author: Simona Mitroiu
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2022-11-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110766531

This book analyzes the impact of abusive regimes of power on women’s lives and on their self-expression through close readings of life writing by women in communist Romania. In particular, it examines the forms of agency and privacy available to women under totalitarianism and the modes of relationships in which their lives were embedded. The self-expression and self-reflexive processes that are to be found in the body of Romanian women’s autobiographical writings this study presents create complex private narratives that underpin the creative development of inclusive memories of the past through shared responsibility and shared agency. At the same time, however, the way these private, personal narratives intertwined with collective and official historical narratives exemplifies the multidimensional nature of privacy as well as the radical redefinition of agency in this period. This book argues for a broader understanding of the narratives of the communist past, one that reflects the complexity of individual and social interactions and allows a deep exploration of the interconnected relations between memory, trauma, nostalgia, agency, and privacy.

The Legacies of Soviet Repression and Displacement

The Legacies of Soviet Repression and Displacement
Author: Samira Saramo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2023-04-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000893014

This book explores the ways in which memories of Stalin-era repression and displacement manifest across times and places through diverse forms of materialization. The chapters of the book explore the concrete mobilities of life stories, letters, memoirs, literature, objects, and bodies reflecting Soviet repression and violence across borders of geographical locations, historical periods, and affective landscapes. These spatial, temporal, and psychological shifts are explored further as processes of textual circulation and mediation. By offering novel multi-sited and multi-media analyses of the creative, political, societal, cultural, and intimate implications of remembrance, the collection contributes fresh interdisciplinary perspectives to both the field of memory studies and the study of Soviet repression. The case studies in this collection focus on the personal, autobiographical, and intimate representations, experiences, and practices related to the remembrance of Stalinist repression and displacement as they are mediated through memoirs, fiction, interviews, and versatile commemorative practices. Taken together, the book asks: what happens to memories, life stories, testimonies, and experiences when they travel in time and space and between media and are (re)interpreted and (re)formulated through these transfers? What kinds of memorial forms are gained through processes of mediation? What types of spaces for remembering, telling, and feeling are created, negotiated, and contested through these shifts? What are the boundaries and intersections of intimate, familial, community, national, and transnational memories? By analytically contextualizing the various case studies within broader memory discourses in a range of geographical and political contexts, the book offers rich and multilayered interpretations of the enduring ramifications of communist repression. The collection demonstrates that these multiply moving memories not only reflect Eastern European memory culture but also reach far beyond and have transnational and transgenerational significance. As such, this timely book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the former Soviet Union or memory studies more broadly.

Women's Voices in the Bluewave Resistance on Twitter

Women's Voices in the Bluewave Resistance on Twitter
Author: Cynthia A Davidson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2023-01-15
Genre:
ISBN: 1793633371

With a focus on Twitter's BlueWave Resistance community of women, Cynthia A. Davidson argues, using rhetorical and political analysis, that political tweeting is an optimistic act--but frames this through engaging Lauren Berlant's claim in Cruel Optimism that what we most desire is also an impediment to our thriving.

Psychoanalytic and Cultural Aspects of Trauma and the Holocaust

Psychoanalytic and Cultural Aspects of Trauma and the Holocaust
Author: Rony Alfandary
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000821099

Psychoanalytic and Cultural Aspects of Trauma and the Holocaust presents interdisciplinary postmemorial endeavors of second-, third- and fourth-generation Holocaust survivors living in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora. Drawing on a wide range of fields, including psychoanalysis, Holocaust studies, journal and memoir writing, hermeneutics, and the arts, this book considers how individuals dealing with the memory, or postmemory, of the Holocaust possess a personal connection to this trauma. Exploring their role as testimony bearers, each contributor performs their postmemorial work in a unique and creative way, blending the subjective and the objective. The book considers themes including postcolonialism, home, displacement, and identity. Psychoanalytic and Cultural Aspects of Trauma and the Holocaust will be key reading for academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, Holocaust studies, and trauma and cultural studies. It will also be of interest to psychoanalysts working with transgenerational trauma.

Representing Childhood and Atrocity

Representing Childhood and Atrocity
Author: Victoria Nesfield
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2022-12-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438490763

Atrocity presents a problem to the writer of children's literature. To represent events of such terrible magnitude and impersonal will as the Holocaust, the transatlantic slave trade, or the Rwandan genocide such that they fit into a three-act structure with a comprehensible moral and a happy ending is to do a disservice to the victims. Yet to confront children with the fact of widescale violence without resolution is to confront them with realities that may be emotionally disturbing and even damaging. Despite these challenges, however, there exists a considerable body of work for and about children that addresses atrocity. To examine the ways in which writers and artists have attempted to address children's experience of atrocity, this collection brings together original essays by an international group of scholars working in the fields of child studies, children's literature, comics studies, education, English literature, and Holocaust, genocide, and memory studies. It covers a broad geographical range and includes works by established authors and emerging voices.

Writing Women’s History

Writing Women’s History
Author: Karen M. Offen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 576
Release: 1991-08-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1349215120

Five essays address such themes as the relationship between feminist history and women's history, the use of the concept of "experience", the development of the history of gender, demographic history and women's history and the importance of post-structuralism to women's history.

Oral History

Oral History
Author: Marta Kurkowska-Budzan
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2009
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9027226504

Oral History: Challenges of Dialogue addresses oral history from two perspectives. The first is the perspective of oral history as dialoguing, the second is the presentation of concrete situations, research, persons, and their own stories as built on the solid ground of discourse and within a concrete context.