Related Papers
jaggannath university, bahadurgarh
Grave of the Fireflies: An Introduction of life, Art, and Evil during WWII
2022 •
Megha dhania
World War II ought to be one of the most destructive and catastrophic wars in the history of the world. We saw great destruction in World War I, but World War II brought more catastrophe. Not only Europe but the whole world turned into a battlefield. World War II set forth an example as to what happens when a feeling of desire for expansion and control changes into destruction and desolation. Based on an original story of World War II survivor, Isao Takahata, produced a movie,‘ The Grave of Fireflies‘, which deals with the tension that builds up during World War II and the firebombing between Japan and the USA. This research paper is an effort to show the way a movie may work to stage the impact and the aftermath of World War II‘ on the life of people.
Proceedings of the UNNES International Conference on English Language Teaching, Literature, and Translation (ELTLT 2018)
Challenge towards War as Grand-Narration Represented in Studio Ghibli’s Film Graves Of The Fireflies
2019 •
Dwiky Juniarta
During World War II, the world is in a blink of chaos with the rise of AXIS power where Japan created propaganda that justified their attack to implement their Ideology as form of international fascism. This study aims to explain Graves of the Fireflies idea as a challenge towards war as a grand-narration that turned out suffers its citizen and become the research question of this paper. Binary opposition, Seita vs Society, as structure and relation to its historical setting and condition of surviving during World War II qualitatively become the data of this inquiry. This study uses Leotard Grand-narration as its theoretical framework and Semiotic approach to see how every scene generates meanings that challenge the war as Grand-narration; this paper reveals how war as Grand-narration justified the mistreatment and hardship of the characters Seita and Setsuko. An important implication of this study is the need to understand the horror of war impacting the under-privileged society as...
Ekphrasis
Thinking Trauma, Essayistically: Configurations of Home, Loss and Memory in Liwaa Yazji's Haunted (Maskoon, 2014)
2021 •
Elke Möller
Liwaa Yazji's film Maskoon (Germany/Syria/Lebanon, 2014), internationally known as Haunted, follows nine individuals in the midst of the ongoing civil war in Syria, including a couple trapped in their house surrounded by snipers, a Syrian man of Palestinian descent who has fled to Lebanon, a man holding out in his Damascus home, a Syrian refugee family temporarily living in an archeological ruin, and another living in what used to be a prison. All present themselves and their narratives in direct address to the camera, creating a sense of intimacy and distance. The thoughts of the protagonists-presented as voice-over or with corresponding footage of the interviews-are contrasted with footage of ruins, rubble, and destroyed physical structures. Refracted through the titular metaphor of 'haunting,' the film contemplates how violence and destruction affect one's relationship to memory, home, and loss, intricately interweaving personal and collective experiences. This contribution explores the (audio-)visual metaphors and narrative images used to make the unfolding crisis of experience 'thinkable.' Against the backdrop of findings from trauma theory, this article argues that Haunted produces meaning and generates knowledge about trauma in the making, especially through essayistic methods and aesthetics. Speaking from the perspective of the filmmaker returning to Syria from exile, the film follows a dialogical approach to explore and share in the social realities of its subjects. Following a media-theoretical reading of Max Bense's "On the Essay and Its Prose" (1948), this article draws on the notion of "essayistic configurations" and "proto-theory" to investigate how the essayistic treatment of trauma bears a potential for challenging cinematic visibility and tellabilty as well as for the conceptualization of trauma and traumatization.
Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies
Testimonies of absence: Trauma and forgetting in The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
Edyta Lorek-Jezińska
“Intersecting Memory and Witnessing Violence in Anita Desai's The Zigzag Way,” Transnational Literature, Vol. 10 (1), 2017.
Bhawana Jain
This essay engages with the juxtaposition of two disparate violent past events: the Holocaust, and the Mexican Revolution, which led to the forced displacement of the diasporic characters in Anita Desai's novel The Zigzag Way. It explores various ways in which the violent past resurfaces in the present and enables different migrant characters of the novel to bear witness to it by using tropes such as ruin, dreams and spectres. The essay also demonstrates subtle and complex intersections among different memory theories to articulate victimisation and enforced silence of the displaced and traumatized characters. It also investigates the role of fiction in depicting the 'unspeakable' horrors of the tumultuous past and the novel's readers as well as the characters' implication in it as secondary witnesses. Hannah Arendt's assertion in On Violence that the twentieth century was 'a century of wars and revolutions, hence a century of violence which is currently believed to be their common denominator,' 1 seems relevant when one counts those innumerable people who were displaced and murdered as a consequence of the Shoah and other violent events across the globe. The memories of these events continue to haunt displaced people as living spectres from the past. This essay explores various ways in which the violent past reappears in the present leading to a sense of loss, trauma and dislocation of the diasporic characters in Anita Desai's novel The Zigzag Way (2004). It also posits that the novel captures memory's (dis)location outside the human body and in the landscape, and the potential narration and the failure to narrate the memory by analysing tropes of ruin, dreams and ghosts, and hybrid narrative techniques. The essay demonstrates that different strands in memory studies intersect in the novel to trace vastly disparate experiences of trauma across racial, cultural and temporal divides (Huichol Indians, the Cornish miners, dissenting Nazis). Pierre Nora's 'lieux de mémoire' (which are 'At once natural and artificial, simple and ambiguous, concrete and abstract, they are lieux – places, sites, causes
Regurgitated bodies: presenting and representing trauma in 'The Act of Killing
2016 •
Lucia Nagib
Focusing on The Act of Killing, this chapter examines how an “ethics of realism” operates on three key cinematic arenas: genre, authorship and spectatorship. As far as genre is concerned, the film’s realist commitment emerges from where it is least expected, namely from Hollywood genres, such as the musical, the film noir and the western, which are used as documentary, that is to say, as a fantasy realm where perpetrators can confess to their crimes without restraints or fear of punishment, but which nonetheless retains the evidentiary weight of the audiovisual medium. Authorship, in turn, translates as Oppenheimer’s unmistakable auteur signature through his role of self-confessed “infiltrator” who disguises as a sympathiser of the criminals in order to gain first-hand access to the full picture of their acts. One of them, the protagonist Anwar Congo, is clearly affected by post-traumatic stress disorder, and his repetitive reliving of his killings is made to flare up in front of th...
Digging up graves and Reopening Wounds: The Articulation of Trauma in Country of My Skull and A Pale View of Hills
Nikki Leibbrandt
This paper is concerned with the articulation of trauma and the ways of representing traumatic events by transforming, modifying and recasting certain memories. It draws primarily on two novels, namely Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (1982) that explores the struggle of working through unacknowledged guilt and vividly, faintly and problematically recalled traumatic memories and Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) that gives an account of the political persecution on individuals during the apartheid state in a complex mixture of personal memories and collective trauma. By revisiting unspeakable pain, loss and humiliation Etsuko and the victims of the TRC dig up buried traumatic experiences and reopens graves that were underground and covered with grass. The trauma as the unspeakable will be considered in this paper to showcase how Ishiguro and Krog allows disguises and silences to speak when the retelling and remembering of traumatic experiences becomes too painful to translate into words.
The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History
Amos Goldberg
Abstract: Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources. Publication Date: 2009 Publication Name: History and Theory
The Poetics of Loss or Imaginative Redescriptions? Narrative Strategies in Recent Memory Texts
Susanne Baackmann
This paper engages with current psychological and social articulations of trans-generational trauma as experienced by both the “second” and the “third” (post-war) generation. At this point, an increasing historical remove contributes to levelling poignant and incontrovertible differences between perpetrator and victim experiences of the legacy of National Socialism. Marianne Hirsch’s seminal conceptualization of transgenerational memory as “postmemory,” for instance, applies to the formation and contradictions of an inherited memory for children and grandchildren of both victims and perpetrators. Yet, I argue, we need to understand the interdependence and terms of these ‘memory symptoms,’ along with the seeming proximity of such disparate subject- positions as part of a far-reaching historical legacy without dissolving them into a convenient and potentially apologetic history of German suffering. The central question posed by the legacy of Auschwitz may be condensed to: Is it possible to express an engagement with that catastrophic legacy without repressing, denying, or nostalgically rewriting painful memories on the one hand, or circumventing complicity by assuming an undifferentiated position of ‘victim of history,’ on the other hand? This question is particularly poignant in light of the fact that such strategies were often employed to articulate war and postwar memories of the first generation tainted by affect and guilt, and as such passed on to the second and third generation. Taking my cue from recent literary studies that have underscored the ability of literature and cinema to express concealed, repressed, or uncomfortable truths about the past, I focus on the aesthetic representation of history as part of what Amir Eshel has called “the poetics of loss.” In fact, I share and want to build on Eshel’s premise that works of literature do not set out to “master” the past but instead present “imaginative redescriptions” (as used by Rorty) , new vocabularies with which to grasp the contradictions and impasses of history. Understood as such “imaginative redescriptions,” the aesthetic representations of history under consideration here no longer allow the question of a ‘proper or improper’ engagement of history and instead their analysis is driven by the desire to understand rather than to know. In a way, these memory texts dramatize history as a Schlüsselszene, as fiction sustained by what Benjamin has called mémoire involontaire, a memory fed by images, “which we never saw until we remembered.” With this premise, I propose to analyze narrative strategies as employed in recent tetxts by Hans-Ulrich Treichel (Der Verlorene) and Katharina Hacker (Eine Art Liebe) as attempts to stage what may be termed a perspective of ‚trans-generational difference’ with respect to the psychological, social and socio-economic effects of war.
