In memory of Daniel Stern (Jan. 18, 1928 -- Jan. 24, 2007) This article provides a brief historical overview of the changing perspectives in trauma studies, the field that has spawned an academic interest in the nature and impact of traumatic experiences. The latest insights of psychotherapists, historians, and cultural and literary critics such as Dori Laub, Bessel van der Kolk, Dominick LaCapra, Saul Friendlander, and Cathy Caruth about witnessing, testimony, representation, and working-through traumatic experiences are used as a frame of reference for the analysis of two novels by the Jewish American novelist Daniel Stern, whose work has somehow failed to achieve canonical status. Stern’s two early Holocaust novels, Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die (1963) and After the War (1967), it is argued, are remarkable, not only for their understanding of the psychological effects of trauma, but also for their use of narrative strategies to mitigate and contain the traumas that dwell at the core of these novels. January 2007: Philippe Codde teaches in the English department of Ghent University, Belgium. He has published on various topics (especially Jewish American literature, French literary and philosophical existentialism, trauma theory, and polysystem theory) in journals including Poetics Today, Yiddish (Modern Jewish Studies), Studies in American Fiction, English Language Notes, Saul Bellow Journal, Thomas Hardy Yearbook, and Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature, as well as in volumes such as Lost on the Map of the World: Jewish-American Women’s Quest for Home in Essays and Memoirs, ed. Phillipa Kafka, and Encyclopedia of Ethnic American Literature, ed. Emmanuel Nelson (Greenwood, 2005; entries on Richard M. Elman, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Edward Lewis Wallant). His book The Jewish American Novel will be published by Purdue University Press in 2007. |
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