Academic Research Report
With regard to the implementation of project PN-II-RU-TE-2011-3-0149, no. 64/2011
for the period January-December 2012
Project title: Cross-Cultural Encounters in American Trauma Narratives: A Comparative Approach to
Personal and Collective Memories, project director Assoc. Prof. Dr. Roxana Oltean
Research and documentation activities
The main aim of the second stage of the implementation of the project (January-December 2012)
was to analyze the mechanisms of traumatic memory in narrative texts, in particular in those that
combine text and image in their narrative construction.
In this sense, in this phase of the project, we carried out research in Bucharest libraries (Central
University Library and the databases available through various subscriptions on a series of electronic
platforms - Roxana Oltean; The Academy Library – Rodica Mihaila), as well as in the Library of the
University of Manchester, Great Britain (Mihaela Precup) or, for the Holocaust, we consulted books and
testimonies of Holocaust survivors from the archives of the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris, France (Dana
Mihailescu).
At the same time, we furthered the individual and comparative analysis of the mechanisms of
traumatic memory in narratives of (trans)cultural experiences pertaining to individual and collective
history:
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Assoc. Prof. Roxana Oltean analyzed tropes and policies of communication as well as
expressions of subversive or complicitous discourse in the Cold War period in Romania and in
the United States, in narratives and in the broadcasts of radio stations such as Radio Free
Europe;
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Prof. Rodica Mihaila analyzed in particular the 9/11 trauma in narratives and documentaries;
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Assist. Prof. Dana Mihailescu followed pre-Holocaust and Holocaust traumas in works by M.E.
Ravage, Konrad Bercovici, Maurice Samuel, Aleksander Hemon, Norman Manea;
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Assist prof. Mihaela Precup dealt with individual and collective traumas manifested through
national and personal mourning in works by Collum McCann, Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran
Foer;
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The research results were disseminated through the following activities:
1. Organizing a workshop with international participation, in this phase of the project, with the title
Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American City Narratives, at the biennial
conference Remapping Urban Spaces – American Challenges, organized by the Romanian
Association of American Studies and by the Fulbright Commission, held at Ovidius University,
Constanta, 4th-6th of October 2012 (http://raas.ro/conferences). The schedule of our workshop
was as follows:
Friday, October 5th 10.30 – 12.00 Reading Room 1(2nd floor)
Session 4 A: Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American City Narratives
Chair:
Roxana Oltean, University of Bucharest
Rodica Mihăilă, University of Bucharest
 Roxana Oltean, University of Bucharest
Totalitarian Cityscapes in Transatlantic Memory

Rodica Mihăilă, University of Bucharest
Healing the Nation, Memorializing Trauma: Ground Zero and the Critique of Exceptionalism in
the Recent American Novel

Cristian Panaite, University of Texas, Dallas
Remembering Communism in Washington DC: Politics, Aesthetics, and Rituals in the Nation’s
Capital

Audrey Bardizbanian, University of Paris-Sorbonne Paris IV
Writing Post-Traumatic Memories and the City: Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Friday, October 5th 13.30 – 15.30 Reading Room 1(2nd floor)
Session 5A: Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American City Narratives
Chair:
Roxana Oltean, University of Bucharest
Dana Mihăilescu, University of Bucharest
 Mihaela Precup, University of Bucharest
“Let us forget walking men”: Levitation and Mourning in Collum McCann’s Let the Great
World Spin
 Dana Mihăilescu, University of Bucharest
Negotiating Traumas via Cross-Cultural Urban Identity Configurations out of Grief: Outlook
on Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project
 Maria Zirra, Utrecht University/University of Bucharest
Nesting Dolls That Don’t Fit: Performing the 1991 Crown Heights Riots in Anna Deavere
Smith’s Fires in The Mirror
 Ilinca-Miruna Diaconu, University of Bucharest
Shadrack’s “shack on the riverbank”: Marginalization and Refuge in Toni Morrison’s Sula
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2. Drafting papers presented at prestigious international conferences:
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Dana Mihailescu presented the paper “Being without Pleasurable Memories: On the Predicament
of Shoah’s Children-Survivors in Norman Manea’s “Proust’s Tea” at the conference Beyond camps
and forced labour: current international research on survivors of Nazi persecution, which took place
at
the
Imperial
War
Museum,
London,
4th-6th
of
January
2012
(http://www.iwm.org.uk/sites/default/files/public-document/BCaFL-Programme2.pdf). The paper
takes as its starting point the theories of psychologists with regard to the memory and identity of
child-survivors of the Holocaust (Paul Valent, Judith Kestenberg, Charlotte Kahn) and of adult
survivors of the Holocaust (Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer). The work analyzes a series of
narratives written by Norman Manea so as to identify the specificity of traumas suffered by child
survivors from Transnistria and the subsequent impact upon their personality of life in a communist
society and then in the United States.
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Mihaela Precup presented the paper ““Let us forget walking men”: Levitation and Mourning in
Collum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin” at the workshop Mapping Generations of Traumatic
Memory in American City Narratives. In this paper, the author analyzed novelist Collum McCann’s
2009 Let the Great World Spin, and focussed on how this work, which enters into a dialogue with
novels by Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer engaging similar issues, brings a major contribution
to the wider contemporary discussion of post-traumatic reinterpretations and re-tellings. In
addition, the paper proposed the concept of levitation as a stage in the process of the public
manifestation of individual and collective trauma, thus contributing to the development of this
project’s research theme.
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Rodica Mihaila was one of the academics invited to deliver a plenary lecture at the conference of
the European Association for American Studies, Health of a Nation, held 30th March-2nd of April in
Izmir, Turkey (http://www.eaas2012.org/files/downloads/Conference_Program-24-Subat.pdf).
Prof. Mihaila’s paper, “Healing the Nation? The Critique of Exceptionalism in the Post-9/11
American Novel,” discussed the degree to which American exceptionalism was affected by and, in
its turn, influenced the collective trauma brought about by the events of the 11th of September
2001. In addition, in the paper presented at the workshop held at the biennial RAAS conference,
Prof. Mihaila presented the results of research into the ideology and reception of monuments in
New York in a space that is traumatic by its very essence, ground 0, focusing on how the discourse
disseminated into public space - though the very existence of these monuments as well as through
public debates about the design of these spaces - brings into perspective the extremely complex
layers of traumatic and post-traumatic memory.
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Roxana Oltean delivered a paper at the workshop organized at the biennial RAAS conference in
which she presented the results of research pertaining to strategies and policies of communication,
subversion or complicity and spaces of trauma or healing created in particular by communication
via radio waves during the Cold War, analyzing the case of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America,
situating this approach at the intersection of memory studies, imagology and transatlantic
relations. The purpose of the research itself and the preliminary results are relevant so as to offer a
more ample perspective upon the complex strategies and policies of communication during the
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Cold War. The research was focused both on primary sources –RFE and VOA broadcasts, the policy
guides for these radios – as well as on theoretical approaches or on case studies with regard to the
impact and reception of the strategies and policies of communication. The research also opens up
new questions and horizons, such as the degree to which the expectations related to the creation
of a space of resistance through strategies and policies of communication elaborated from beyond
the Iron Curtain were met or on the contrary disappointed, and the manner in which these
strategies and policies have created or attenuated spaces of traumatic memory running along
several generations.
3. Publications
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In this stage, we continued to publish papers that are closely connected to the topic of our research
paper, in specialized international journals indexed by ISI-AHRI or in Romanian reviews indexed in
international databases, as follows: 1 article about the images of Romania and America in
narratives of Jewish-Romanian immigrants to America at the beginning of the 20th century,
published in East European Jewish Affairs (Routledge, ISI-AHRI journal, author: Dana Mihailescu) ; 1
review about the memory of survivors of the Holocaust in Romania published in Journal of Jewish
Studies (ISI-AHRI journal, author: Dana Mihailescu) ; 1 article about personal traumas in the
aftermath of the Vietnam War in Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell A True War Story“ (in University of
Bucharest Review, 2011 issue published in 2012; author: Dana Mihailescu).
• Dana Mihailescu. “Images of Romania and America in Early Twentieth-Century Romanian-Jewish
Immigrant Life Stories in the United States.” East European Jewish Affairs 42.1 (April 2012): 25-43. ISSN
1350-1674 / ISSN 1743-971X online [Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, Manchester, UK, AHRI-ISIindexed journal]. <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501674.2012.665585>.
• Dana Mihailescu. “Review of Mémoires des Juifs de Roumanie, by Mehdi Chebana and Jonas Mercier
Mure-Ravaud”. Journal of Jewish Studies 63.1 (April 2012): 186-189. ISSN 0022-2097 [Oxford, UK, ISIAHRI-indexed journal] http://www.jjs-online.net/toc.php?subaction=content&id=063_01.
• Dana Mihailescu. “On the Performative Lure of War Memories: Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War
Story”.” University of Bucharest Review. A Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies (vol.1, no 2, 2011): 105-114.
<http://pdc-connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/73181735/performative-lure-war-memories-tim-obriens-howtell-true-war-story>. ISSN: 2069-8658.
Project Director,
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Roxana Oltean
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