Graduate Journal of Social Science

Articles

• “The Wound and the Gift”: Rewriting the Wounded Self Through the Gift of Language. A Study of Jeanette Winterson’s Autobiography Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

  Struzziero Maria Antonietta

  • Abstract

    Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011) is the autobiography of the writer whose life is marked by traumas connected with her abandonment at birth, her subsequent adoption, and a further rejection by her adoptive family when they discover that she is having a lesbian relationship.

    In the memoir, the paper will argue that the author tackles the hermeneutics of self-representation. She wishes to make sense of the personal past and to trace its trajectory as a means to discover the origin of the self and re-write it along different existential and psychological lines.

    During her memory journey back into her past, Winterson relentlessly returns, and revisits, the traumatic events of her early life, still stored in her buried memories, allowing them to surface to her conscious mind. She gradually deconstructs her old self through a slow and painful interpretive process that, in the end, leads to psychic healing and artistic creation.

    Winterson’s autobiography will be read in the light of memory and trauma studies; psychoanalysis, as well as Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985).

    Keywords

    autobiography, memory, trauma, postmodernism

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  • pp. 12–26

• The Venice Ghetto at 500: Sitebased Approaches to Memory Studies

  Katharine G. Trostel and Avigail S. Oren

  • Abstract

    This essay traces the expansion of memory studies as a discipline through the lens of the Venice Ghetto and reveals how a particular memory-space can be used comparatively to study other, far-flung spaces. The Venice Ghetto has a site-specific history and local regime of memory. But, as an archetype whose blueprints have been used globally, we can also deduce patterns of memory that can be applied to the psycho-geography of other site-specific places. After visiting the Ghetto during the summer of 2016—the 500^th anniversary of its founding as the world’s first ghetto—we have taken a more psycho-geographical approach to teaching the relationship between space and memory, with the objective of bringing the field of memory studies into the globalized, twenty-first century.

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  • pp. 27–36

• Remains of a former village institute in Turkey: Memory at the border of Voluntary and Involuntary

  İnci Ünal

  • Abstract

    The paper focuses on Village Institutes, schools that were established in the early years of the Turkish Republic and had an integral part in the nation-formation process of Turkey. The purpose of this paper is to inquire how a former Village Institute in a Tatar village is remembered by its graduates, village inhabitants, and people who are nostalgic to the enlightenment ideals these schools represented. The paper is based on an ethnographic study, which includes interviews conducted with the former students, the elderly in the village, and the members of an NGO called YKKED (Yeni Kusak Köy Enstitülüler Dernegi) “New Generation Village Institutes Association”. This paper investigates the voluntary practices to remember these schools, yet also discusses the possibility of involuntary memory in modern times by approaching the ruins of the former Village Institute as an affective space.

    Keywords

    Turkey, Tatar, identity, village, nationalism, education, memory, affective space, nostalgia, material culture

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  • pp. 37–61

• The Family Album: From Personal Stories to Memory Wars in Estonian Art

  Annika Toots

  • Abstract

    This paper analyses some of the aspects of the relationship between memory and art in post-Soviet Estonia. Focusing on artworks from the 1990s that use photographs from family albums as a medium for different kinds of memory, this paper aims to highlight the intricate relationship between memory and photographs, especially in the process of the construction of (a new) identity, which inevitably includes forgetting and collective amnesia. In this paper, subjects such as personal memories and death are seen as a form of protest in Estonian art. In addition, while analysing artworks from the 1990s and their recent re-presentation, this paper finds that there has been a shift in the perception of the Soviet past in recent years. While during the 1990s, the process of memory making excluded all the connections to Soviet past, in recent years, the Soviet past and the Soviet aesthetics have become something exotic for a new generation of young artists.

    Keywords

    photography, family album, identity, post-Soviet memory, present pasts

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  • pp. 62–76