Category: Issues

Volume 9 Issue 1-2

“Sólo te voy a decir”: Sexual Trauma in Consuelo García’s Las cárceles de Soledad Real (1982)
Deborah Madden

“Something I feel so shamed about still”: Postcolonial Trauma in Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe
Judith Broome

Language, Memory, Massacre: The Legacy of Trauma among Chechen Diasporas
Rebecca Ruth Gould

Writing the Self in Jane Eyre: A Study in Trauma
Meera Jagannathan

Decolonizing Climate Trauma Narratives: Eco-Ancestral Connecting in Case’s “Animals at the Eve of Extinction” and Indigenous Survivance in Lin’s Rise
Lara-Lane Plambeck

Review
Laura Lazzari and Nathalie Ségeral, eds., Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Emanuela Caffè

Resilience and Trauma in Alexandra Fuller’s Memoirs
Lena Englund

Witnessing Impossibility: The Traumatic Theater of Rachel Neuburger’s Nepenthe
Leonie Ettinger

Anna Kavan’s Ecologies of Trauma: Who Are You? and Ice
Alice Hill-Woods

Airing Trauma on the BBC Third Programme
Jeremy Lowenthal

(Not) Looking Back, Looking Forward: Post- and Future Memory in Everywhere at the End of Time
Alexandra Weiss

Palestinian Postmemory: Melancholia and the Absent Subject in Larissa Sansour’s In Vitro, Saleem Haddad’s “Song of the Birds,” and Adania Shibli’s Touch - Layla AlAmmar

Therapeutic Applications of Ciné-théâtre in Reframing Trauma Narratives and Attenuating Posttraumatic Distress in the Survivors of Sexual Violence: Koffi Kwahulé’s Les Recluses - Eric Wistrom

Testimony, Aporia, and the Holocaust in the Poems of Dan Pagis - Ashok K. Mohapatra

Trauma and Colonial Specters in Assia Djebar’s Fiction - Amar Guendouzi

A Russian Poetics of Trauma: Encounters with Death and the Literary Reclamation of the Individual - Laurie Vickroy

Revisiting the Sites of Trauma: The War Poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, and Richard Hugo
Michael Sarnowski

Ricoeur’s Theory of Metaphor as Trauma Praxis
Iris J. Gildea

Dystopia, Trauma, and Resignation: A Reading of Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Annabel Herzog

Postmemory’s Graphic Symptom: Disembodied Voice, Repetition Compulsion, and Working through Trauma in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica
Jin Lee

Forms of Mediation in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir
Donato Loia

Book Review
Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance. Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster
Catriona Kennedy

Symptoms of Psychological Problems among Children of Holocaust Survivors: Faye Sholiton’s The Interview - Gene A. Plunka

The Politics of Parenting in Nancy Huston’s Fault Lines: Transgenerational Trauma Revisited - Susan Bainbrigge

The Trauma of the Archive in Sinan Antoon’s Novel Fihris - Sami Alkyam

Guests of Empire, Ghosts of Dispossession: Traumatic Loss and the Subject without a Proper Name in The Gangster

We Are All Looking For - Yasuko Kase

The Banal Sublime of Postcolonial Bombay and Calcutta: The Embodied Ghosts, Falling Bodies, and Tangled Webs in

Chandra’s “Dharma” and Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address - Molly Volanth Hall

This bilingual issue has a threefold purpose: to expose, map, and encounter the primary moment of the catastrophe from a Japanese perspective—made available here to most Anglophone readers for the first time. The concomitant and secondary effort is aimed at examining some of the patterns of evasion and repetition that characterize the suppressed moment of cultural and historical adaptation and reaction to the catastrophe, with the final hope of opening up the debates surrounding the critical responses to the atomic bombings, understood as one of the central traumatic “limit events” of our epoch, to an alternative set of cultural, critical, and literary perspectives.

This special issue stems from the international conference Trauma and Gender in Twentieth-Century European Literature, organized in March 2016 at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow under the aegis of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, and with the kind support of the Wellcome Trust.1 The studies included here explore how the axis between trauma and gender intersects in a range of narratives by men and women writers and filmmakers in twentieth-and twenty-first-century Europe. The issue discusses the ill-effects of war as experienced by soldiers but also its long-lasting impact on civilians as manifested in different forms of trauma. In other words, it looks, from the perspective of gender, into the expression of trauma caused either by the historical context (World War I, World War II, Francoism, etc.) or by personal events. In so doing, it is significant that some recurrent themes emerge, such as silence, rape, illness, death, and, indeed, the trauma of gender itself.

The articles here—focusing on the experience and manifestations of trauma in North African, Armenian, and Arab literatures— seek to articulate the relationships of trauma, suffering, and literature in critical and hermeneutic modes that are rooted in the contexts themselves. One strand that stands out in all the articles here is a concern with the “history” of suffering and the possible narration, poetic or prosaic, of the past and the struggle that must occur for the essential nature and significance of that suffering to emerge into clear and full historical recognition. This issue attempts to contribute to this necessity, incorporating articles that cover notions as diverse as the concept of “Levantine literature” and the status of the “voice” in a dialogue of Jewish and Arab literatures, the public role of the poet in relation to human rights and illegal incarceration, the gendering of the Algerian national liberation struggle, and the conceptual and literary significance of the attempted Armenian genocide. All these articles attest to a strong sense of an expanding perspective and the renewing force of literature and trauma studies as it establishes its conceptual vigour and literary and intellectual significance.

Volume 4 Issue 1-2 – Figurations of Postmemory

Guest Editors: Emmanuel Alloa, Pierre Bayard, Soko Phay

From the Guest Editors' Introduction:
"The concept of postmemory has received some attention over the past few years in the field of literary and memory studies and beyond. Like the conference before it, this special issue seeks to assess the concept’s diagnostic relevance for dealing with the question of the aftermath of extreme violence. Taking as its starting point the genocidal experience of the Holocaust, the special issue asks what it would mean to apply the notion of “postmemory” to other cases of traumatic memory in the 20th century: in particular, the genocides perpetrated in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Although wide-ranging in temporal distance from the present, all of these cases raise the question of how memories of such traumatic events remain active even among those who have not personally witnessed them, as well as the question of how to address these sorts of indirect memories."

Investigations in Literature, Trauma, and Theory

From the Editor's Introduction:
"The articles presented here range from major reinterpretations of the seminal works of trauma and literature study to considerations of the demands of class on the major categories of trauma analysis, the role of figurative and poetic language in trauma testimony and theory, and the interlocking of hermeneutics, trauma theory, and theology. These articles mark both a return to primary ethical concerns and a renewed theoretical energy." (D. Miller)

Category: Issues

Volume 9 Issue 1-2

Volume 8 Issue 2

Volume 8 Issue 1

Volume 7 Issue 2

Volume 7 Issue 1

Volume 6 Issue 1-2 Literature and Trauma after Hiroshima: A Japanese-English Bilingual Issue

Volume 5 Issue 2 Narrating Gender and Trauma

Volume 5 Issue 1 North African, Armenian and Arab Literatures

Volume 4 Issue 1-2 – Figurations of Postmemory

Volume 3 Issue 2 Investigations in Literature, Trauma, and Theory