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<DIV align=center><FONT color=#808080 size=2>UNSW Media, Film and Theatre
Seminars<BR>5 p.m. Wednesday 8 June 2005<BR>Webster Building 327<BR><BR></FONT>
<H1><FONT color=#800000 size=7><B>Debating Trauma Theory</FONT> </B></H1><FONT
color=#008080 size=7>Susannah Radstone<BR><BR></FONT></DIV><FONT color=#808080
size=4>Why the current academic interest in trauma studies? On the
one hand, trauma theory responds to the need to overcome, or at least address,
perceived impasses within humanities theory. On the other, trauma theory is
linked with wider cultural preoccupations, fascinations and obsessions - with
survivor movements, with discourses of victimhood and with generalised
incitements to give testimony or offer witness statements.<BR><BR>This paper
argues that the evaluation of academic engagements with trauma theory ought not
to be separated out from an analysis of the wider cultural movements and
discourses that constitute its constitutive contexts. After contextualising
trauma theory within contemporary academic debates concerning history,
referentiality and subjectivity, the paper addresses, in broad brush-strokes,
the dominant cultural context within which it might be placed.
Trauma theory, it is argued, reproduces certain contemporary cultural
blind-spots or denials. It therefore needs to take on board some of the
insights provided by the psychoanalytic theories with which it claims close
relationship.<BR><BR></FONT><FONT color=#808080 size=2>Susannah Radstone teaches
in the School of Cultural and Innovation Studies at the University of East
London. She writes on cultural theory, particularly psychoanalysis and memory
studies, and on contemporary film and literature. Her publications include
<I>Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory </I>and <I>Regimes of Memory</I>
(both ed. with Katharine Hodgkin, 2003); <I>Memory and Methodology</I> (ed,
2000); and <I>The Women's Companion to International Film</I> (ed. with Annette
Kuhn, 1994). Her current projects include an edited book on <I>Culture and
the Unconscious</I>, a special issue of <I>Economy and Society</I> on 'The
Emotions in Public Life', and a monograph titled <I>On Memory and Confession:
The Sexual Politics of Time</I>, to be published by Routledge.
<BR><BR></FONT>__<FONT color=#808080
size=1>_______________________________________________<BR>Dr James
Donald<BR>Associate Dean (Education), Faculty of Arts and Social
Sciences<BR>Professor of Film Studies, School of Media, Film and
Theatre<BR>University of New South Wales<BR>Sydney<BR>NSW
2052<BR>Australia<BR><BR>Telephone:
<X-TAB> </X-TAB>(02) 9385
4858<BR>Mobile:
<X-TAB> </X-TAB>0433
126445<BR>Facsimile:<X-TAB> </X-TAB>(02) 9662
2335<BR><BR>International<BR>Telephone:
<X-TAB> </X-TAB>+612 9385
4858<BR>Mobile:
<X-TAB> </X-TAB>+61 433
126445<BR>Facsimile:<X-TAB> </X-TAB>+612 9662
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