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Exploring the status of the oneiric beyond psychoanalysis, Dreams and atrocity synthesises interdisciplinary perspectives from literary criticism, medical humanities, memory and cultural studies, history and art practice. The volume sheds new light on the relevance of dreams as modes of psychic resistance and historical witness as well as symptoms of trauma in modern and contemporary representations of atrocity. Central to the book is the articulation of the oneiric’s potential to awaken us to the pervasive violence of our contemporary world – providing us with the means not only of diagnosing but also of responding to historical episodes of atrocity, from twentieth-century genocide to contemporary racism and transphobia. The contributors develop new ways of reading the dreamlike in cultural works, foregrounding its power as an aesthetic mode and political tool. Organised into three parts – ‘Dream images’, ‘Dreams as sites of resistance’, and ‘Violent states’ – the book conducts a timely enquiry into the role played by the unconscious in processing and illustrating atrocity in an increasingly violent world. In so doing, it attends to the significance of dreams in dark times, illuminating the triangulated relationship between dream life, memory and trauma.
In this afterword, which signals the end of our collective project exploring the significance of the oneiric in modern and contemporary representations of trauma, we offer some concluding remarks and discuss further the potential of dreams as tools through which our contemporary reality, marked by neoliberalism and an unprecedented global pandemic, can be critically approached. To end the present
demeanour of the characters, but also by the aesthetics of their environment, the film’s discontinuous formal and narrative structure, and by the distinct sound-mass aspect of both the diegetic and extradiegetic soundtracks. 1 Framed within these oneiric characteristics is a near-future, space-based tale of incarceration, violence, medical experimentation and, ultimately, existential annihilation. At issue in this chapter will be
Malinka-Clarisse’s ghostliness in Ladivine could be read as less realistic than oneiric, in the way she sees herself and is seen by her husband and daughter. In her article, ‘Louise L. Lambrichs: trauma, dream and narrative’, Victoria Best argues that the dream experience ‘requires recounting and interpreting if it is to be of psychic value’ ( 2003 : 38). Indeed, Lambrichs’s protagonists succeed in
memories that are useful to react to the immediate present situation are selected in waking life, then this would explain why memories that would prevent Gérard from living a seemingly peaceful life, including memories of his father, would remain confined to the domain of the oneiric. In a note immediately following the play that briefly elaborates on the genesis of Rêver peut-être , Grumberg states that
the active resistance enacted through dreams and the dreamlike in spaces of marginality. Hence, I insist on the oneiric space as ‘inherently political’ (Baker, Chapter 6 , 126). Focusing on the politics of the oneiric invites us to move beyond purely psychoanalytical frameworks, forcing us to grapple with the material complexities rooted in questions of power, domination and agency for marginalised subjects
At night, in our dreams, we would go out (Jean Cayrol, ‘Lazarean Dreams’) What does it mean to dream in ‘dark times’? What becomes of dream experience, once revered as an imaginary intervention into the otherwise monotonous reality of the everyday, after modernity has ‘sapped all significance from oneiric life
Middle English literature registers intimate concerns with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. These concerns about sleep, and the intersecting medical and moral discourses with which they engage, have been overlooked by studies more concerned with what sleep sometimes enables (dreams and dream poetry), or with what sleep sometimes stands in for or supersedes (sex). In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act, both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries; both subject to a particular habitus, and understood through particular, and pervasive, hermeneutic lenses. This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that carry specific ethical, affective and oneiric implications in the medieval English cultural imagination, and that also offer defining contributions to different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau. Concentrating particularly on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this book also attends to a longue durée in the literature and ideas about sleep circulating from the twelfth century to the early seventeenth. It focuses on continuities in the construction of sleep across this span – scientific, social, spiritual and spatial continuities – and explores the cultural specificity of premodern English literature’s widespread interest in sleep. Analysing the ways in which representations of sleep in a range of genres animate ethical codes and emotive scripts, this book’s contributions include establishing the significance of sleep-related motifs to Middle English romance, and offering a more embodied understanding of dream visions by Chaucer, Langland and the Pearl-poet.
concentration camps or transported to unknown locations – also uniquely recur in the oneiric activities of those with no perceptible connection to the Holocaust years or even the geographies pertaining to the event. In addition to scholarly examinations of this phenomenon, including Joseph L. Henderson’s 1978 essay ‘Dreams of Nazi Germany’, the importance of dreams of this kind is exemplified by their
Modernism, with its enthusiasm for bricolage and fragment, might seem to have predicted the blitzed ruinscape of the 1940s; yet, arguably, it was modernism itself which was ruined by the cultural rupture, and this chapter traces the ways in which its aesthetic schemata collapsed under the sudden actualization of its metaphors.
The search for an aesthetic ratification of the suffering and destruction of the war is traced through six cultural responses. The Blitz stories of William Sansom (published between 1944 and 1948) are full of falling walls, fires and bombed buildings which become uncannily alive, haunted by a non-human agency. Joyce Cary’s novel The Horse’s Mouth (1944), meanwhile, is read as a troubling account of art’s destructive power. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), a neurotic nostalgia erupts from the ruins of an English country house, and this is placed into dialogue with the oneiric bombsite odyssey of Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness (1950).
The murals of the Festival of Britain on the South Bank, notably John Piper’s An Englishman’s Home (1951), are also considered, alongside Hugh Casson’s campaign to preserve and aestheticize the ruins of London’s bombed churches as monuments to the Blitz. A striking picture emerges of tumbling walls as an image of revolutionary remaking instigated by the uncanny power of art.