Event Title
Session3
Location
Centre de formation et de séminaires (CEFOS) in Remich/Luxembourg
Start Date
9-3-2013 3:00 PM
Description
Professor Diane Long Hoeveler: “Mourning in Plain View: On Monuments, Trauma, Historical Memory, and Forgetting”
Respondent Professor David Punter
ABSTRACT
This essay presents a fairly Freudian-centered reading of trauma literature and nationalistic allegory because both, I would contend, can be read through the use of his theories. Following a reading of the first lecture Freud gave at Clark University in 1909, Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences, the article examines his theories of trauma and their relation to what I label the “nationalism script”: applying Freud’s theories about fantasies to the construction of nationalism or citizenship, then, we could say that a nation-state builds its unique identity on cultivating in its subjects intense legends about their quasi-supernatural origins as a people (Romulus and Remus, etc.). A nation-state employs something like a seduction scenario, placing her citizens in quasi-erotic positions in relation to a “father-land” or a “mother-land,” to whom one owes love, fealty, loyalty, and obedience. Finally, the nationalism script genders its citizens, relegating them into categories that proscribe active or passive behaviors (being a soldier or breeding soldiers for the cause). And then death is the ultimate sacrifice that one can make for the nation-state, and those who make this sacrifice are rewarded with a permanent and public monument about which the populace flocks on specified occasions. The glorious dead are resurrected in the myth that the nation-state constructs about its founding and maintenance, all of which leads to yet another generation perpetuating the same pattern. This article argues that a number of literary texts published during the nineteenth century and in reaction to Napoleon’s imperialistic agenda increasingly interrogated the nationalism script, and then it focuses on Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy as a representative early nineteenth-century text.
Session3
Centre de formation et de séminaires (CEFOS) in Remich/Luxembourg
Professor Diane Long Hoeveler: “Mourning in Plain View: On Monuments, Trauma, Historical Memory, and Forgetting”
Respondent Professor David Punter
ABSTRACT
This essay presents a fairly Freudian-centered reading of trauma literature and nationalistic allegory because both, I would contend, can be read through the use of his theories. Following a reading of the first lecture Freud gave at Clark University in 1909, Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences, the article examines his theories of trauma and their relation to what I label the “nationalism script”: applying Freud’s theories about fantasies to the construction of nationalism or citizenship, then, we could say that a nation-state builds its unique identity on cultivating in its subjects intense legends about their quasi-supernatural origins as a people (Romulus and Remus, etc.). A nation-state employs something like a seduction scenario, placing her citizens in quasi-erotic positions in relation to a “father-land” or a “mother-land,” to whom one owes love, fealty, loyalty, and obedience. Finally, the nationalism script genders its citizens, relegating them into categories that proscribe active or passive behaviors (being a soldier or breeding soldiers for the cause). And then death is the ultimate sacrifice that one can make for the nation-state, and those who make this sacrifice are rewarded with a permanent and public monument about which the populace flocks on specified occasions. The glorious dead are resurrected in the myth that the nation-state constructs about its founding and maintenance, all of which leads to yet another generation perpetuating the same pattern. This article argues that a number of literary texts published during the nineteenth century and in reaction to Napoleon’s imperialistic agenda increasingly interrogated the nationalism script, and then it focuses on Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy as a representative early nineteenth-century text.