Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture

Dr. David Gurevitz David Gurevitz is one of Israel's most outstanding scholars in the field of cultural research. He heads the program in Media and Popular Culture in the School of Media Studies at the College of Management Academic Studies (COMAS) in Israel. Dr. Gurevitz has lectured at leading universities in Israel and abroad and spent two years as a Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Gurevitz holds a Ph.D. degree, with honors, from Bar Ilan University, Israel. Among his key publications are "White Noise - Literature and Education in the Postmodern Era" and "Feminism and Postmodernism." He completed his post-doctoral research at Harvard University. His primary area of expertise is postmodern culture and its ties to popular culture. His research focuses on the relations among ideological narratives in culture, law and the media. Dr. Gurevitz has authored the Introduction to a series of books title Postmodern Encounters (edited by poet Nathan Zach, 2002), and authored the following books: Postmodernism - Literature and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (1997); The Encyclopedia of Ideas (2012, co-authored with Dan Arav); and Detective as Culture Hero (2013). His upcoming book, Gangster-Chic: Crime, Culture and Capitalism, will be published in 2014. Together with Roni Levinger, he is now working on a book titled Communitrism and Literature, to be published during 2015. Yochai Ataria Yochai Ataria is a Post-Doc at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Neurobiology Dept) under the supervision of Dr. Amos Arieli and Prof. Rafael Malach. Yochai has written a number of articles on various topics relating to altered states of consciousness, mainly concerning the relationship between the sense of self, the sense of time and the sense body during traumatic experiences. He has also published a number of articles regarding the meditative experience.

Introduction.- Part I: Representations of Trauma.-Trauma and Literature: The Postmodern Option - Franz Kafka and Cormac Mccarthy.- Cultural Trauma and the Media.- Television: A Traumatic Culture.- Popular Trauma Culture: The Pain of Others Between Holocaust Tropes and Kitsch-Sentimental Melodrama.- The Trauma of Modernism: Between Existential Indeterminacy and Allegoresis.- Before Recognition: On the Aesthetics of Aftermath.- From Hiroshima to Fukushima: Comics and Animation as Subversive Agents of Memory in Japan.- Performative Recollection: Koizumi Meiro Representations of Kamikaze Pilots and the Trauma of Asia-Pacific War in Japan.- Architecture and Trauma.- Art as the Transport-Station of Trauma.- Part II: Theory of Trauma.- The Trauma of Philosophy.- Irresponsible Nonsense: An Epistemological and Ethical Critique of Postmodern Trauma Theory.-The Death of the Witness in the Era of Testimony: Primo Levi and GeorgesPerec.- Walking, Walking Out and Walking Through: Transitional Space and Traumatic Time.- Trauma and Monotheism: Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism and the Possibility of Writing a Traumatic History of Religion.- The Crisis of Manhood.- Laius Complex and Shocks of Maternality: With Franz Kafka and Sylvia Plath.- Fear, Trauma, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Clinical, Neurobiological, and Cultural Perspectives.- Part III: Case Studies of Collective Trauma.- Some Reflections on Transmitting the Memory of the Holocaust and its Implications, Particularly in Israel.- Placing Collective Trauma within its Social Context: the Case of 9/11 Attacks.- Masculinity, Spirituality, and Male Wartime Sexual Trauma.- Killing the Killer: Rampage and Gun Rights as a Syndrome.- Loss, Traumatic Bereavement and Mourning Culture: The Israel Example.- Fear and Silence in Burma and Indonesia: Comparing Two National Tragedies and Two Individual Outcomes of Trauma.- Conclusion: Trauma and Culture: How Trauma can Shape the Human Mind.

"The editors of this work, all of whom are experts in trauma and interdisciplinary studies, have compiled an exceptional collection of essays that explore how trauma is examined and revealed through popular culture, be it in film, television, art, or literature. ... This volume is recommended for undergraduate and graduate students (particularly psychology and mass communication students), as well as researchers and faculty. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; researchers and faculty." (E. Fisher, Choice, Vol. 54 (9), May, 2017)