Rehearsing Trauma

Accounts of detention survivors exert pressure on the theoretical framework that reserves a role for the reader in a post-Freudian hermeneutics of catharsis. In analysing the prison narratives of Ruth First and Emma Mashinini, I explore the position of the imagined reader in the complex dynamic at work when writing emerges from a position of woundedness. A reappraisal of the role of the imagined reader is warranted, in order to accommodate both the formative communality that operates in these texts and the complexity of a political context where “the public” is both ally and adversary, simultaneously enabling and complicating a survivor's self-construction.The task of asserting a new self in writing, to contest the criminalising “vocabulary” of the state security system, is both undermined and made all the more urgent by the overwhelming self-doubt which that system induces. Narrative self-construction can be thought of as an appeal as much as an assertion of self. The paradigm of trauma studies potentially enables attentiveness to the anxiety and vulnerability of detention survival. However, that attentiveness is undermined by theoretical abstractions that locate catharsis deep within individualised subjects and by attempts to imagine human connectedness across a generalised conceptualisation of trauma

Aesthetics · Catharsis · Criminology · Epistemology · Freudian slip · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology · South African History and Culture · Torture, Ethics, and Law

• Annual Bibliography of Works about Life Writing, 2012-2013

  Phyllis E Wachter, Aiko Yamashiro•Biography•2013

  Incluir item

• The true confessions of an albino terrorist

  Breyten Breytenbach•The true confessions of an albino…•1985

  Incluir item

• Trauma

  Cathy Caruth•Trauma•1995

  Incluir item

• On the question of autobiography

  David Attwell•Current Writing•1991

  Incluir item

• Discipline and Punish

  Raffaella D’amico•Telos•1978

  Incluir item

• Imagined selves, (un)imagined marginalities

  Dorothy Driver•Journal of Southern African Studies•1991

  Incluir item

• Autobiography and the 'power of writing

  Paul Gready•Journal of Southern African Studies•1993

  Incluir item

• Trauma theory and postcolonial literary studies

  Irene Visser•Journal of Postcolonial Writing•2011

  Incluir item

• The ethics and aesthetics of representing trauma

  Jo Collins•Journal of Postcolonial Writing•2011

  Incluir item

• Memory and photography

  Katherine Isobel Baxter•Journal of Postcolonial Writing•2011

  Incluir item