Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media

by Anne Rothe

Overview

In Popular Trauma Culture, Anne Rothe argues that American Holocaust discourse has a particular plot structure—characterized by a melodramatic conflict between good and evil and embodied in the core characters of victim/survivor and perpetrator—and that it provides the paradigm for representing personal experiences of pain and suffering in the mass media. The book begins with an analysis of Holocaust clichés, and then explores the embodiment of popular trauma culture in two core mass media genres: daytime TV talk shows and misery memoirs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813552200
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	09/15/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	222
File size:	398 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

ANNE ROTHE is an assistant professor of German at Wayne State University.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Oprah at Auschwitz

Part I. Popular Trauma Culture: Generating the Paradigm in Holocaust Discourse
1. Holocaust Tropes
2. Victim Talk
3. American Survivors
4. Trauma Kitsch

Part II. Television: Watching the Pain of Others on Daytime Talk Shows
5. Talking Cures
6. Trauma Camp

Part III. Popular Literature: Reading the Pain of Others in Misery Memoirs
7. Selling Misery
8. Fake Suffering
9. Forging Child Abuse
10. Simulating Holocaust Survival

Epilogue: Fantasies of Witnessing

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This is a passionate book of exemplary moral integrity. Anne Rothe provides a straightforward, unflinching indictment of the way that contemporary mass culture gorges itself on the display of human suffering."

Binghamton University, SUNY - Wulf Kansteiner

"This is a passionate book of exemplary moral integrity. Anne Rothe provides a straightforward, unflinching indictment of the way that contemporary mass culture gorges itself on the display of human suffering."

From the Publisher