Commemorating Trauma
Subtitle: The Paris Commune and Its Cultural Aftermath
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: April 15, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780823226030
Subjects: European history: c 1750 to c 1900; Social history; c 1800 to c 1900; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; French; European - French; Literary Criticism & Collections / French; Europe - France; 1870-1940; Commune, 1871; France; History; Paris (France); Politics and government; Third Republic, 1870-1940
Description: " Nothing says more about a culture than the way it responds to deeply traumatic events. The Reign of Terror, America's Civil War, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Kennedy assassination, September 11th-watershed moments such as these can be rich sounding boards for the cultural historian patient enough to tease out the traumatic event's complex cultural resonances. This book is about one such moment in the history of modern France. The so-called Terrible Year began with the French army's crushing defeat at Sedan and the fall of the Second Empire in September of 1870, followed by the Prussian occupation of France and first siege of Paris in the fall and winter of that year. But no event of the period proved so deeply traumatic as the Paris Commune of 1871 and the bloody reprisals that attended its demise. Commemorating Trauma engages the rich body of recent scholarly work on cultural trauma to examine a curious conundrum. Why do French literary, historical and philosophical texts written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune so often employ the trope of confusion (in both the phenomenal and cognitive senses of that term) to register and work through the historical traumas of the Terrible Year? And how might these representations of confusion both reflect and inflect the confusions inherent to an ongoing process of social upheaval evident in late nineteenth-century France-a process whose benchmarks include democratization and the blurring of social classes, a persistent and evolving revolutionism, radical reconfigurations of the city as lived environment, and the development of specifically capitalist logics of commerce? These are the two principal questions addressed in this important study of cultural memory."--Publisher's website.