Writing and Reading to Survive: Biblical and Contemporary Trauma Narratives in Conversation
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Writing and Reading to Survive brings a number of trauma narratives from the Hebrew Bible into conversation with contemporary trauma narratives, exploring how these ancient and modern-day stories mitigate the experiences of pain and suffering in the face of trauma.
Focusing on the intersection between trauma and gender, the trauma narratives here include biblical narratives emerging from the cataclysmic events that all but destroyed the people of Judah at the time of the sixth-century bce invasion and exile. They also include examples of ‘hidden’ or ‘common’ or ‘more mundane quiet’ traumas that are reflective of women’s experience. In both biblical as well as contemporary trauma narratives, one sees evidence of insidious trauma associated with the systemic violence of a deeply patriarchal society; the secret trauma of reproductive loss that connects with many women’s lives both then and now; the ever-present reality of gender-based violence.
To read contemporary trauma narratives alongside biblical trauma narratives can have the effect of expanding readers’ vision, perhaps introducing them to texts that yield fresh insights into often painful topics associated with women’s experience of trauma. Continuing the conversation on the importance of trauma hermeneutics for reading biblical literature, the trauma narratives represented in this monograph serve as a safe haven for those, in past and present contexts, who are reeling from the effects of severe trauma, to voice the unspeakable, and to move towards healing and recovery by writing and reading to survive.
Writing and Reading to Survive is the first volume in a new series from Sheffield Phoenix Press, the Trauma Bible.
This is a Logos Reader Edition. Learn more.
- Brings a number of trauma narratives from the Hebrew Bible into conversation with contemporary trauma narratives.
- Explores how ancient and modern-day stories mitigate the experiences of pain and suffering in the face of trauma.
- Focuses on the intersection between trauma and gender.
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Trauma Narratives Past and Present
- Chapter 1: Haunted by the Past
- Chapter 2: Narrating Reproductive Loss
- Chapter 3: Handmaids’ Tales
- Chapter 4: Vulnerable Bodies
- Chapter 5: Talking Back
- Conclusion: Reading Trauma Narratives
- Bibliography
- Index of References
- Index of Authors
Given the multiple, intersecting traumas faced by so many people around the world at present (including in Africa), Claassens’ work here is timely and important. Through her engaging and highly readable writing (which is accessible for both academic and non-academic audiences alike), she offers a valuable transdisciplinary contribution to the study of the Bible, literature, and trauma. She also provides readers with a valuable means of making scholarly study relevant and impactful beyond the confines of the academy. For that reason alone, this book is worth its weight in gold.
—Caroline Blyth, journal of Theology for Southern Africa.
Claassens skillfully summarizes her main points using a metaphor appropriated from Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz. Coming to terms with trauma is an “ongoing process of improvisation in which traumatic memories are told and retold from different viewpoints,” much like the techniques of jazz, until traumatic memory is transformed into narrative memory (153). These techniques further enable the traumatized to get “unstuck, by reframing traumatic events,” and possibly permit them to imagine futures wherein all hope is not lost (154). Claassens effectively and brilliantly models these jazz techniques throughout the book as she identifies often hidden and secret traumatic experiences and brings in contemporary narratives. She helps readers identify and imagine how women reframe traumatic events and improvise new forms of community in the face of insidious traumas. At the same time, Claassens pulls readers into the world of the traumatized characters, enabling us to discern how our lives intersect with theirs and invites us to use our power and agency to transform systemic violence and oppression, especially against women. In this way, we all illustrate that reading, writing about, and responding to trauma narratives are acts of individual and collective survival. This book further contributes to the ongoing trend in biblical studies of putting biblical texts and other literature into conversation about the impact of trauma on individual and group identities.
—Ericka S. Dunbar, Baylor University, The Bible and Critical Theory Journal.
- Title: Writing and Reading to Survive: Biblical and Contemporary Trauma Narratives in Conversation
- Author: L. Juliana Claassens
- Publisher: Sheffield Phoenix Press
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Pages: 192
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- ISBNs: 9781910928783, 191092878X
- Resource ID: LLS:WRTNGRDNCNVRSTN
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-09-10T14:47:19Z
Prof Juliana Claassens (PhD Princeton Theological Seminary) is Professor in Old Testament and Head of the Gender Unit at the Faculty of Theology, Stellenbosch University. She is the author of Writing and Reading to Survive: Biblical and Contemporary Trauma Narratives in Conversation (Sheffield Phoenix Press 2020); Claiming Her Dignity: Female Resistance in the Old Testament (Liturgical Press, 2016); Mourner, Mother, Midwife: Reimagining God’s Liberating Presence (Westminster John Knox, 2012). She has edited a number of anthologies including Feminist Frameworks and the Bible: Celebrating Intersectionality, Interrogating Power, Embracing Ambiguity (ed. L. Juliana Claassens and Carolyn Sharp; Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017) and Transgression and Transformation: Feminist, Postcolonial and Queer Biblical Interpretation as Creative Interventions (ed L Juliana Claassens, Christl Maier, Funlola Olojede; Bloomsbury TT Clark, 2021).
She currently is working on a commentary on Jonah for OTL (Westminster John Knox) in which she reads Jonah through the lens of trauma hermeneutics as it intersects with gender, postcolonial and queer biblical interpretation.