NEWSLETTER - FALL 2009
From the time of earliest consciousness, Irene Kacandes knew something terrible had happened to her father in wartime Greece. Words like “trapped,” “abandoned,” “terrified,” and “starved” are among her first vocabulary words. These concepts engendered fear in the young child and anger in the young adult. As a middle-aged professor, Kacandes finally decided to figure out the mechanisms of generational transmission of trauma. Presenting this research required the invention of a new form, something Kacandes decided to call a “paramemoir” to indicate her work’s relation to narratives of personal experience and its divergence, its “going beyond [para]” that form. Comparing stories of her father’s generation and those of other members of her own, she created a “brain scan” of family memory, a simultaneous view of how certain past events are present today in the memories of a large number of family members. In her recently published book, Daddy’s War, and in this talk, Kacandes shares her analysis of that family memory scan from the perspectives of daughter, narratologist, and trauma expert and hopes to spark a discussion with the audience about the ethics of research on one’s own family.
Irene Kacandes is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. She currently chairs the German Studies Department. She is author of Daddy’s War: Greek American Stories (U of Nebraska P, 2009) and Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion (U of Nebraska P, 2001) and coeditor of A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies (U of Michigan P, 1997) and Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (MLA 2005), as well as of a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on “Witness” (2008). She has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University and has also studied at the Free University in Berlin, Germany and at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Author of articles on German and Italian cultural studies, narrative theory, feminist linguistic theory, trauma studies and Holocaust studies, her current research focuses on family memory and the Second World War. Kacandes is recipient of a Fullbright Full grant, a SONY grant, Dartmouth College Junior and Senior Faculty Fellowships, and a fellowship at the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial. She has served in numerous capacities for various divisions of the Modern Language Association and on the executive committees of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature and of the German Studies Association
Photograph: J. Mehling
