The Study On Memory And Culture Trauma Construction Of Media

Cultural trauma is the experience of injury for a group of people,it is not an unrestrained empirical fact,but the consciously cultural construction.Taking "cultural trauma" as the core theory and "media" as the starting point,this study discusses the cultural trauma links,especially the role of mediation that these three media forms(media reports,sites of memory and rituals of memory)played in constructing the cultural trauma of 5.12 Wenchuan earthquake.This dissertation is divided into three parts.Firstly,it makes a judgement on whether the 5.12 Wenchuan earthquake has the nature of cultural trauma through exploring how this painful experience was described as culture trauma in public domain by the examples of media discourses on People's Daily.Moreover,the second part describes how realms of memory(memory place and memory ritual)realizes the meaning reproduction in space and time.The third part analyzes the difference and causes of the appearance of collective memory and personal memory,and probes into the communication effect of the media in the process of trauma re-production.Those three parts were studied through the mixed approaches of text analysis matched with content analysis,and field observation combined by in-depth interview.This study found that 5.12 Wenchuan earthquake is represented as cultural trauma whose carrier group is all Chinese people.The narratives of the trauma were fixed by sites of memory as well as mnemonic practices,generating sense and enhancing identification through spatial symbols and specific rites.However,there was still a distinctly confrontational discourse between "memory" and "oblivion",for which a certain amount of time is needed to heal from the trauma completely.