What should we do with places that were theatres of mass suffering and atrocity? Should we keep them as they were, to remind us of the past, or transform them? This volume addresses these questions by discussing selectedγkey trauma sites, analysed with an innovative semiotic methodology that sheds new light on the notions of trauma and memory.
Since Auschwitz, and more and more frequently today, places that were theatres of mass suffering and other atrocities are becoming common features of our cultural landscape. What should we do with these places? Keep them as they were, to remind us of what actually took place there, as ideal museums of past evils? Or should we transform them and, if so, into which forms and according to which principles? Which pasts do these places transmit, and how? This volume uses an innovative semiotic methodology to analyse selected key trauma sites. The author demonstrates that these places can become, once properly interrogated, privileged observatories capable of throwing light upon the many different conflicts, forms of social control, and power relationships that underlie any politics of memory. The selfsame notions of trauma and memory become, in this way, rewritten in quite a different light: far from any kind of naturalistic definition, they emerge as painful Β«knotsΒ» within which many of the most crucial questions in the contemporary world are intertwined.
“Praise for the Italian edition: A lucid and highly articulate semiotic inquiry of trauma sites ... Violi records what she sees and hears, recounts her own responses and those of others, photographs the places, describes them, reconstructs their historical background, and at the same time she interprets them with great acumen, using categories borrowed from Memory and Trauma Studies, as well as from the semiotics of Eco and Greimas. At the heart of her analysis is the complex relationship between the sites of memory and the visitors to whom they are addressed ... -- Valentina Pisanty, University of Bergamo, Il Manifesto”
Β«Overall, Landscapes of Memory is a fascinating exploration of a wide variety of sites, referencing many in brief alongside the dominant chapter leaders. [...] this is an important study of a range of trauma sites and demonstrates not only that there is much for us to learn about sites beyond the familiar European selection, but that each site can teach us something about trauma and a populationβs response to it more generally.Β»
(Glyn Morgan, European History Quarterly 48(3) 2018)
Patrizia Violi is Full Professor of Semiotics in the Department of Philosophy and Communication and Coordinator of the PhD Program in Semiotics at the University of Bologna. She is Director of the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Director of TRAME (Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Memory and Cultural Traumas; at the University of Bologna. Her main areas of research include text analysis, language and gender, and semantic theory. She is currently working on cultural semiotics and traumatic memory, in particular on memorials and memory museums.
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