Trauma or Entertainment? : Inside and Outside Symposion

ISBN-13: 9783639112153 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 52 str.

Krisztina Rácz

Opis

Opposed to what it is to be expected, the bombing ofSerbia in 1999 is not present in the public discourseof the country as a traumatic event, if it is presentat all. My research deals with the absence of thistrauma, and the creation of a collective memory of itamong the community of the contributors of thejournal Symposion. It explores how the interactionalong the lines of the non-acknowledged traumaconstitutes a mnemonic community of the mostlyHungarian authors living either in Serbia or inHungary. By looking at their private e-mails andconducting interviews with some of the members ofthis community, I argue that the community is linkedthrough emerging shared narrative patterns that havethe function of normalizing the experience andcreating shared cultural frameworks for rememberingit. The research hopes to fit the case of the Symposion correspondence into a both empiricallyand theoretically analyzable framework of collectivememory studies, works on trauma and on narration.

O autorze

Krisztina Rácz. MA in English language and literature, University
of Szeged, Hungary and MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology,
Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.
Interested in anthropology, literature, cultural studies, youth
cultures. Writes for the cultural supplement Beton of the daily
Danas in Serbia.