Cultural Studies paper by Fodor, Mónika
“She kept her secret going long time.” Multimodal Intergenerational Trauma Telling in Life History Interviews. A Case Study. (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentationAbstract (max. 250 words):
“My grandfather had done some really, really bad things in World War 2.” Intergenerational trauma as an embedded story in life history interviews is an authoritative and dynamic narrative tool to reveal the complex beliefs shaping the self and their identity choices. In this talk, I will discuss a case study based on the analysis of the life history of a Hungarian American man living in Hungary as told in a series of interviews with an unusually long time in between. The narrative analysis highlights how the multimodal collective remembering induced by the Terror Háza museum in Budapest informs the trauma telling. Moreover, the case study analysis reveals how intergenerational trauma positions the storyteller as an agency in his life history and how he understands that the processes he cannot control shape his identity. I will discuss concepts such as the impact of the perpetrator’s trauma, controlling the meaning-making in intergenerational memory narratives, the construction of narrative tellability, and the effect of collective remembering by photographs on individual identity construction.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mónika Fodor is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Pécs. She has published on the conversational and discourse analysis of narratives, identity, ethnicity, oral histories, narrative, and memory in ethnic identity construction and using culture as content in the EFL classroom. Her recent research focuses on the role of intergenerational memory in narrative meaning-making in collective remembering.