Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: The question of trauma, the ways in which individual or collective psyches respond to violent events that are by their nature "unassimilable," has been a central preoccupation of clinical psychology since its inception.2 At least as far back as the work of Charcot, Janet, and Freud, traumatized minds, memories and bodies have featured extensively in psychoanalytic discourse.3 However it is only comparatively recently that criticism has begun to consider trauma in its own right, despite its frequent reliance on the conceptual vocabulary of psychoanalysis.Hence in an important survey of the issue from 1997, John Berger acknowledges the relative novelty of the approach, asking "why, at this moment, trauma should attract such attention and become a pivotal subject." 4 Nevertheless, the amount of work exploring the ways in which traumatic experience may be embedded and encoded in texts is already impressive, and it is perhaps with some justification that Taiwo Afuape links trauma criticism to the appearance of a "burgeoning trauma industry," such is its current "pervasiveness and influence" in analysis.5 Given these efforts, it is perhaps inevitable that trauma should have filtered into discussions of medieval drama, with its spectacular scenes of torture and dismemberment that often "blur the boundaries between real and realistic violence."6 Over the last two decades scholars such as Margaret Owens, Jody Enders, and Marla Carlson, to name but a few, have published work in this field.7 However, while these discussions make clear the semblance between dramatic spectacle and the experience of trauma, and spell out the fruitfulness of trauma theory for analysts of medieval theatre, they tend to travel in broadly the same direction.Most of these scholars tend to focus on the power of trauma to disrupt or derange language,
Source: Figshare
Author: Ben Parsons (7598420)
Institution: University of Leicester
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2745479052