| Writers and filmmakers have used disparate forms to bear witness to traumatic events, both collective and individual, in contemporary culture. In testimonial texts, past events are re-membered and given meaning for the present. I am interested in the role form plays in constructing some events as "significant" and others as "insignificant". What criteria do critics explicitly and implicitly use to judge particular forms as appropriate or inappropriate to the event being witnessed? What implications does form have for how we re-member an event?;Chapter one draws on some recent literature on testimony and trauma, to examine why some forms are considered to be particularly appropriate for remembering traumatic events, and how these assumptions inform the reception, analysis and evaluation of cinematic, literary and non-literary texts. The remaining four chapters juxtapose canonical representations of the Holocaust (Alain Resnais' Night and Fog and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah), with non-canonical texts which bear witness to other marginalized histories: the history of forced assimilation as experienced by one Australian Aboriginal family (Sally Morgan's My Place), and the histories of a working-class and a middle-class British woman in 1950s London (Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman and Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy). My method of strategic defamiliarization aims to destabilize the category of "history" by juxtaposing incommensurable texts and histories and thereby bringing into relief the issue of how historical "significance" is constructed. I encourage the reader to think about these texts in ways not possible in a study which focused exclusively on Holocaust films or on women's narratives. I use this method to bring into visibility assumptions about the personal and the historical, and familiarity and defamiliarization as textual strategies and textual effects. I conclude that texts which use impersonal forms, and thereby retain a distance between speaker and listener, seem to be considered as more significant by critics--perhaps because the personal is generally associated with the feminine in culture. These assumptions need to be questioned, since personal forms make visible traumatic events which occur in the domestic sphere, and show that the historical and the subjective are mutually implicated. |
