Title
Commemorating Trauma : The Paris Commune and Its Cultural Aftermath / Peter Starr.
ISBN
9780823291229
Published
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2022]
Copyright
©2006
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (240 p.)
Item Number
10.1515/9780823291229 doi
Summary
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.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
Available in Other Form
print 9780823226030
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translations
Introduction. The Commune and the Right to Confusion
1 Why Confusion? Why the Commune?
2 The Time of Our Melancholy: Zola's Debacle
3 Mourning Triumphant: Hugo's Terrible Year(s)
4 Science and Confusion: Flaubert's Temptation
5 The Party of Movement: Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet
6 Democracy and Masochism: Zola's Bonheur
7 The Filmic Commune
Notes
Bibliography
Index