Dreams and atrocity

Download or read book Dreams and atrocity written by Emily-Rose Baker and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the relationship between oneiric and historical episodes of atrocity as depicted in transnational twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, film, literature and theatre. Examining the political and aesthetic power harnessed by dreams in increasingly ‘dark times’, it takes as its starting point the overlooked significance granted to the oneiric beyond Freudian psychoanalysis. By reading the oneiric within variously known cultural texts – including Holocaust fiction, world cinema, Bronx theatre, surrealist art and two collections of wartime dream transcriptions – the volume also offers a renewed perspective on modern and contemporary trauma. In so doing, it demonstrates the relevance of the oneiric, beyond the interpretative framework of psychoanalysis, as an aesthetic and political tool with which to alert us and respond to the violence of our contemporary world.