Table Of Content18 Vol. 18
C u l t u r a l H i s t o r y a n d C u l t u r a l H i s t o r y a n d
li t e r a r y im a g i n a t i o n li t e r a r y im a g i n a t i o n
M
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How do we approach other people’s pain? This question is of crucial importance to the M
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humanities, particularly literary and cultural studies, whenever they address narratives d
of terror and genocide, injustice and oppression, violence and trauma. Talking about lin
g
other people’s pain inevitably draws attention to the ethical dimension involved in er
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acknowledging stories and histories of violence while avoiding an appropriation – by the n
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reading public, literary critics or cultural historians alike – of the traumatic experiences P
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themselves. The question of how to do justice to the other’s pain calls for an academic ilip
response that reflects as much on its own status as ethical agent as on literary expression p
S
and philosophical accounts or theoretical descriptions. This volume therefore explores o
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the theoretical framework of trauma studies and its place within academic discourse n
t
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and society, and examines from a multidisciplinary perspective the possibilities and g
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limitations of trauma as an analytical category. A variety of case studies on individual e
d
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and collective traumatic experiences as portrayed in literature and art highlight the ethical )
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implications involved in the production, reception and analysis of other people’s pain.
O
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r Other People’s Pain
P
Martin Modlinger has studied English Literature and Linguistics, History and Ethics of e
o
Textual Cultures at the Universities of Munich, Perth and Erlangen-Nuremberg. He is p
l
currently a doctoral student in the Department of German and Dutch at the University e’s Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (eds)
of Cambridge. P
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i
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Philipp Sonntag has studied English Literature, Philosophy, Political Science and Ethics
of Textual Cultures at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He is currently a doctoral Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics
student in the Department of English/American and Romance Studies at the University
of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9
Peter Lang
www.peterlang.com
Other People’s Pain
CuLTuRAL HisTORY ANd LiTERARY iMAGiNATiON
EdiTEd BY CHRisTiAN J. EMdEN & dAvid MidGLEY
vOL. 18
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
Other People’s Pain
Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics
Martin Modlinger and Philipp sonntag (eds)
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
die deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the deutsche Nationalbiblio-
grafie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Other people’s pain : narratives of trauma and the question of ethics /
Martin Modlinger and Philipp sonntag (eds).
p. cm. -- (Cultural history and literary imagination ; 18)
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 (alk. paper)
1. violence in literature. 2. violence--Psychological aspects. 3.
Psychic trauma in literature. 4. Ethics in literature. i. Modlinger,
Martin, 1981- ii. sonntag, Philipp.
PN56.v53O75 2011
809’.933552--dc22
2011009000
issN 1660-6205
isBN 978-3-0343-0260-9
© Peter Lang AG, international Academic Publishers, Bern 2011
Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, switzerland
[email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of
the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and
processing in electronic retrieval systems.
Printed in Germany
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag
Introduction: Other People’s Pain –
Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics 1
Colin Davis
Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other’s Story 19
Aleida Assmann
From Collective Violence to a Common Future:
Four Models for Dealing with a Traumatic Past 43
Susannah Radstone
Trauma Studies: Contexts, Politics, Ethics 63
María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro
Narrating the Holocaust and its Legacy: The Complexities
of Identity, Trauma and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus 91
Bettina Bannasch
Zero – A Gaping Mouth:
The Discourse of the Camps in Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel
between Literary Theory and Political Philosophy 115
Hubert Zapf
Trauma, Narrative and Ethics in Recent American Fiction 145
vi
Rudolf Freiburg
Trauma as Normalcy: Pain in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain 169
Susana Onega
Trauma, Shame and Ethical Responsibility for the Death
of the Other in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians 201
Notes on Contributors 237
Index 241
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all those who participated in the international and
interdisciplinary conference ‘Other People’s Pain: Narratives of Trauma
and the Question of Ethics’, which was held at the Centre for Research in
the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) in Cambridge in
March 2010, on which this volume is based, especially our co-organizer
Christopher M. Geissler, the Department of German and Dutch at the
University of Cambridge, particularly Chris Young and David Midgley,
Acting Director of CRASSH Andrew Webber, and our conference admin-
istrator Anna Malinowska, who made this event possible.
The conference was generously supported by CRASSH at the Uni-
versity of Cambridge, the Ethics of Textual Cultures honours graduate
programme at the Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Augsburg, the
Tiarks Fund of the Department of German and Dutch at the University
of Cambridge, and the Gates Cambridge Trust.
We are very grateful to the Ethics of Textual Cultures honours gradu-
ate programme at the Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Augsburg
for its generous support of the publication of this volume. Furthermore,
we would like to thank Edinburgh University Press (<http://www.eup-
publishing.com>) for their kind permission to reprint a revised version of
Susannah Radstone’s article ‘Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics’,
which was previously published in a special issue of Paragraph 30/1 (2007),
entitled ‘Trauma, Therapy and Representation’, edited by Nerea Arruti
with Bob Plant.
— Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag
Cambridge/Erlangen, December 2010
Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag
Introduction: Other People’s Pain –
Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag opens a discussion of the
photography of suf fering with a reference to Virginia Woolf’s Three Guin
eas, described by Sontag as Woolf’s ‘brave, unwelcomed ref lections on
the roots of war.’1 Woolf claims therein that the shock of horrific pictures
cannot fail to unite ‘people of good will’; that photographs of war will
invariably create a ‘we’ that is opposed to the atrocities before ‘our’ eyes.
Susan Sontag begs to dif fer. ‘No “we” should be taken for granted when
the subject is looking at other people’s pain.’2
In the last twenty years, a new ‘we’ seems to have emerged with respect
to horrific histories and their deeply disturbing forms of representation:
the unifying field of trauma studies. Other people’s pain has become one
of the core interests of literary and cultural studies. While narratives of
loss, oppression, marginalization, and physical and psychological trauma
are by no means new to readers and viewers, the particular dedication of
the humanities to these issues has reached a new quality. ‘[W]e inhabit an
academic world that is busy consuming trauma […]. We are obsessed with
stories that must be passed on, that must not be passed over’, writes Patricia
Yaeger, and asks, ‘What happens when we “textualize” bodies, when we
write about other people’s deaths […] as something one reads?’3
This new interest in pain and death, in the suppressed histories of
persecuted and annihilated peoples – not only a trend but also a method
1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004), 3.
2 Ibid., 6.
3 Patricia Yaeger, ‘Consuming Trauma; or, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating’, in
Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, eds, Extremities. Trauma, Testimony and the
Community (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 25–51, 29.
