Browsing by Author "Kall, Christina"

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Thinking back and thinking forward – through her own split. En metateoretisk studie om självbiografisk metod och trauma hos Shoshana Felman och Maxine Hong Kingston
(2015-12-01) Kall, Christina; University of Gothenburg/Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion; Göteborgs universitet/Institutionen för litteratur, idéhistoria och religion
Is it possible to speak or write about yourself, if you are considered, or experience yourself, as not able or allowed to do so? Can a person gain subjectivity and agency in limited situations? In this study I outline a new term called perverted agency to examine moments and figures within the text and the autobiographical gesture where limited spaces are transformed by a renegotiation of a hierarchy of values. According to literature critic Shoshana Felman in What Does a Woman Want? (1993), women cannot write autobiographies due to trauma and its impact upon memory. The aim of this study is to examine autobiographical methods and figurations of trauma. By first casting light upon cracks within some of Felman’s reasoning, I chisel what she, despite her dystopic view on women’s autobiographical writing, regards as strategies. Turning to the well praised autobiography The Woman Warrior (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston where trauma and the traumatic speech is an overall trope I apply some of Felman’s strategies as a part in examining what methods are used to write about ’what cannot be written about’. Eventually I apply Felman’s own criteria on her theoretical work to argue that she is in fact writing her own autobiography while formulating her own poetics. Through a perverted agency, by using and transforming trauma and a ’poetics of impossibility’ – figures and rhetorical gestures of hesitation, speculation, dissociation, splits, and a coexistence of different genre, discourses, and aesthetics – into a kind of poetics of possibilities, Felman and Kingston create their autobiographies.
Trauma, vittnesmål och etik. Representationens möjligheter och omöjligheter i Hayden Whites "The Modernist Event" samt i Shoshana Felman och Dori Laubs "Testimony"
(2013-07-03) Kall, Christina; Göteborgs universitet/Institutionen för litteratur, idéhistoria och religion; University of Gothenburg/Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion
This essay is a meta-theoretical study that aims to show normative and ethical implications that might follow from theories concerning representation of traumatic events in four essays from Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History and in Hayden White’s essay ”The Modernist Event”. Through a comparative analysis the essay mainly discusses how these writers deal with the problem of narrative. With a thematic reading the writers’ view on narrative are emphasized in relation to questions regarding events, history, trauma, truth, testimony, the unifying function of language, and production of meaning. While Felman/Laub value narrative positively, partly because through its performativety it is regarded as action, White on the other hand tends to connect it with fictionalizing. If for Felman, the writing of history is the explaining of an event through its own narrativity, White supposes that events have been unjustly squeezed into the pattern of narrativity. Although narration is closely connected with the access to the truth of a witnessed event, Felman/Laub don´t manage to avoid becoming normative. When the failure to witness is regarded as the condition of witnessing and when the union of language, as I interpret Felman/Laub, is said to be constituted by sane people the question that arises is which form representation should take and who then would be a suitable or even possible witness. Meanwhile Whites’ preference for modernistic, literary strategies for representing that which he calls modernist events result in a high appraisal of the fragmentizing and decentralizing of meaning who’s supposed non-totalizing qualities can be questioned. Despite the different perspectives which Felman/Laub and White have regarding narrative they both paradoxically manage to reinforce its position as an epistemological and ethical failure as it is often regarded in modernism, by the very way they, on the contrary, tries to save it.
Vittnet eller mottagaren? Att skapa traumaestetik istället för att lyssna
(LIR. journal, 2015) Kall, Christina
The aim of this article is to throw light upon normative features and ethical implications that follow when discussing the problem of ’testimony’ in essays from Testimony. Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992) by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. My concluding point being that we, rather than focusing on the witness, need to start drawing more attention to the receiver/listener. Initially regarded as an impossible narrative in the writing of Felman and Laub, the Holocaust gradually transforms into a possible narrative, but to what cost? Here we are faced with two problems. In an attempt to save the narrative as a form of testimony by stressing its performative aspects, the representational qualities lose some of their urgency and consequently become secondary. When the failure of witnessing is inscribed as a condition of the ’authentic testimony’, and the witness is characterized by terminal crisis, she or he gets aestheticized as the unknown other. The risk here being that this inscription of the failure brings priority to testimonies showing their own shortcomings, and so, we have a modernist poetics of trauma excluding differing forms of traumatized testimonies.