Participants:

Ivan Delazari (Nazarbayev University, Astana).“Traumas One Adapts (To): Neglect and Denial in Response to Faulkner’s Fiction and Its (Post-)Soviet Reincarnations on Screen”

Larissa Muraveva (Smolny Beyond Borders). “Russian autofiction between therapy and retraumatization”

Ilya Kalinin (Smolny Beyond Borders; Humboldt University in Berlin). “War as will and representation in post-revolutionary, post-war and post-Soviet literature: trauma between return and repetition”

Garris Rogonyan (Smolny Beyond Borders). “Literature and the Difficulty of Reality”

The exuberant research into traumatic experience in culture, launched by C. Caruth and her immediate successors, now seems to have given place to the perception of trauma as a multifaceted and constantly redefined phenomenon. Not only is the traditional question of its representability no longer a pivotal issue, but also the a priori assumption that such a representation liberates is called into question. While contemporary theorists increasingly want to view cultural and literary narratives as therapeutic performances, even “the practice of care” (I. Galichon), rather than as mere representation, authors and readers of contemporary fiction often speak of “retraumatization,” caused precisely by intensified empathy and an eroding “aesthetic distance.” Autobiographical testimonies have acquired a prominent role for constituting collective memory, functioning as “counter-memory” (M. Foucault) to ideologies; however, they are also often powerless to compete with the indoctrination and propaganda of repressive regimes and thus to reshape the established memorial culture.

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