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This interdisciplinary study examines Ian McEwan's Atonement by combining narrative analysis with the theories of Sigmund Freud and Paul Virilio. It looks closely at narrative techniques, time-related complexities, and cultural meanings in Atonement, linking Freud's idea of repetition compulsion with Virilio's views on technology and perception. Briony Tallis represents both Freudian traumatic re-enactment and Virilio's concept of the integral accident. Her ongoing guilt, like a rosary, symbolizes the repetitive nature of trauma. Using Virilio's gestalt theory, the study offers a new way to understand the novel's focus on perception. This research fills a gap in existing literature by bringing together Freud's psychoanalytic perspective and Virilio's technological insights to analyze Atonement. This combination of theories is a new approach that provides fresh insights into how McEwan's narrative structure reflects the interplay between trauma, technology, and cultural reception. For example, the study explores how the novel's fragmented narrative mirrors Briony's fractured psyche and how technological advancements during the wartime setting influence characters' perceptions and actions. This study of Ian McEwan's Atonement demonstrates how stories can help individuals understand their feelings and experiences better. It uses psychology and technology to explore how storytelling affects the understanding of trauma, perception, and the modern world.

With Great House (2010), Nicole Krauss offers a choral novel that interweaves the lives of several characters loosely connected by a huge, wooden desk that one of them relentlessly chases around the world. A possible symbol of the memory of the Second World War Jewish genocide transmitted to younger generations, the desk powerfully materializes transmission in its potentially traumatic, obsessional, and violent dimensions. This essay deals with the way first- and second-generation women, in the novel, develop ingenious, creative but also uncompromising responses to the inescapable duty of remembrance. While the dominating male characters freeze memory in timeless, petrified representations, these female writers expose its terrible necessity while hiding nothing of the damages memory causes to witnesses and descendants. They claim a right of inventory and use the desk as an echo-chamber reflecting both the suffering voices of children and the dark presence of defaulting fathers and failing mothers, thus allowing for a new generation to be born with a more bearable heritage.

While serial killings, murders, and other violent deaths are traumatic incidents for the communities in which they occur, they also attract a great deal of media attention and form the basis for numerous cinematic adaptations in US-American cinema and beyond. Many of these movies employ a sensationalist approach and focus on the social environments of the killings: the perpetrator's upbringing, triggering experiences, or a generally troubled personality. There are only a limited number of cinematic treatments of violent killings that focus on the natural environment or the landscapes where these incidents occurred. This article is concerned with filmmakers using (cinematic) landscapes as a mode of cultural expression for violence and trauma. It seeks to show that James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986) calls for a different understanding of landscape that goes beyond a mere setting for narrative, as it gives landscape active agency in its mediation of two seemingly unconnected murder cases. The film compares and juxtaposes the murder of Kirsten Costas by Bernadette Protti in a suburb of San Francisco in 1984 with the killings of Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in the 1950s. In doing so, the film presents viewers with two distinct functions of landscape in mediating violence and trauma: as a spatialization of time and as socio-political surroundings. Analyzing these aspects of the film helps us to better understand the link between landscape, violence, and trauma in cinematic treatments of violent incidents and also sheds light on the broader connection between landscape and trauma culture.

The article considers the category of trauma as a specific object of interdisciplinary research, and identifies the signs of historical trauma. Historical trauma is understood as the preserved memory of generations about social upheavals and events that disrupted the usual course of life and transformed the system of basic values. The scientific objectives of the research involved analysis of the events that took place on the territory of the closed administrative and territorial formations of the nuclear industry in the 1990s and can be characterized as a historical trauma. The breakdown of the usual way of life in the determined, artificially created environment of closed cities which was more painful than in a significant part of open cities became the consequence of the all-Russian transient transformational dynamics. The characteristics of the period on the part of the population of atomic cities were often accompanied by themes of physical and domestic survival and social tension. The events that have taken the meanings of trauma place can be described as representing historical significance and having in the collective consciousness. On this basis, the author has concluded that the study of the post-Soviet history of closed administrative-territorial formations of the nuclear industry through the prism of trauma research opens up new perspectives in understanding their development.

The Columbine High School shooting of 1999 has become a cultural icon for school shootings in the United States and beyond. Still, there are only a few cinematic adaptations of it. This article addresses how these movies nonetheless impact the culture of remembering Columbine. It argues that films about Columbine use different strategies to mediate the trauma of the shooting that are closely related to framing or recreating trauma. In addition, as traumatic events such as Columbine often lack clear causes and effects, this article will argue that film is particularly effective in mediating trauma.

Biblical scholars are divided regarding the presence of Deuteronomistic theology in Psalms 44, 74, 80 and 89. This article re-examines this issue through the lens of trauma and argues for two points. Firstly, Psalms 44, 74, 80 and 89 do not reject Deuteronomistic theology because the accusations of God in these psalms do not indicate attribution of responsibility but demonstrate trauma victims’ negative cognition and emotion associated with the traumatic event. Secondly, the concept of post-traumatic growth (PTG) helps to clarify two crucial elements of Deuteronomistic theology concerning divine retribution and divine promise. Psalms 44 and 74 assume the first element; Psalms 80 and 89 presuppose the second. Contribution: This article provides a fresh angle from trauma studies to approach biblical texts in the Hebrew Bible, clarifying the connection between Deuteronomistic theology and communal laments.

Much has been written about psychopathology of Holocaust survivors and the transmission of this terrible trauma to their offsping. The purpose of this article is to discuss this two points: 1) The complex, articulated and sometimes contradictory elements that emerge from the scientific and clinical literature, that is if all the Holocaust survivors are traumatized and to what extent. An examination of the literature seems to show two different Groups: the one of those “self-referred” who have actively asked for help or for psychological support or with clear mental illness, and the one of those who have not seeked help or manifested clear mental illness. The two different populations (“clinical” or “systematic selected by the empirical research”) can explain the different results of the evaluation of the effects of the trauma; 2) The developmental sequelae of Trauma across Generations. About this second point on the transmission of trauma, the proposal of the Authors relates to the integrative, multifactorial, point of view that includes psychodynamic, sociocultural, family system, biological and attachment perspectives, which explains that the trauma itself is not directly “passed on” to second and third generations, but mitigating or aggravating factors can modulate the sequelae of the transmission.

This contribution will examine different communicative and narrative strategies adopted by some documentary productions in order to visualize something invisible, like the virus and its effects. Through the case studies I will take into account, my intent is to reflect upon the pandemic narration, which replaces or alternates the photographic realism of the images of pain and suffering, intended as scientific and incontrovertible proof of the virus manifestation, with a modernist narrative, mixing interviews with infographic material, maps, dashboards, photomicrographs, and computer graphics animations. Despite their profound mediation by software that makes pictures out of numbers, these informatic images, reported daily in news channels and broadcasts as well, besides shaping the relationships between scientific research, documentary, and its explanatory and pedagogical power to narrate, reconfigure the collective imagination of the pandemic in a bioinformation era.

This contribution will examine different communicative and narrative strategies adopted by some documentary productions in order to visualize something invisible, like the virus and its effects. Through the case studies I will take into account, my intent is to reflect upon the pandemic narration, which replaces or alternates the photographic realism of the images of pain and suffering, intended as scientific and incontrovertible proof of the virus manifestation, with a modernist narrative, mixing interviews with infographic material, maps, dashboards, photomicrographs, and computer graphics animations. Despite their profound mediation by software that makes pictures out of numbers, these informatic images, reported daily in news channels and broadcasts as well, besides shaping the relationships between scientific research, documentary, and its explanatory and pedagogical power to narrate, reconfigure the collective imagination of the pandemic in a bioinformation era.

Found at the crossroads between aesthetics and referentiality, portraiture is a hybrid form of painting conflating inner and outer references. Although the perceived connection and ‘likeness’ between work of art and the subject being depicted seems to differentiate portraiture from other kinds of paintings, this relationship to a perceived reality is far from linear, particularly so when portraits or other works of art are represented in literature – a longstanding literary device known as ekphrasis. The present article will demonstrate how literary representations of portraiture (more specifically, of self-portraiture) can be used to symbolise a narrative’s underlying themes and motifs, namely, in Margaret Atwood’s 'Cat’s Eye' (1988) and Ana Teresa Pereira’s 'As Rosas Mortas' (1998). Elaine and Marisa, Atwood and Pereira’s first-person narrators, are both painters creating and describing a variety of self-portraits inspired by childhood trauma, fragmented memories, and the subconscious mind. Artistic self-expression becomes, in these novels, the distorted and indirect medium through which Elaine and Marisa question, integrate, and accept the traumatic and, at times, the monstrous within. This article will compare Atwood and Pereira’s use of ekphrasis and examine how fictional self-portraits can be used to explore the relationship between subject and self-representation – an essentially fragmented and unstable relationship, especially so for survivors of trauma.

Starting from Hirsch and Smith’s concept of a feminist counterhistory and referencing the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this paper undertakes a (re)reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as construction of gendered countermemory. Such an interpretation would enable a recognition of the political function of the novel as an identity matrix of African-American womanhood. Expanding upon the classical, post-Lacanian approach to trauma studies and its post-colonial reconfigurations, I use a poststructuralist framing of collective trauma, and the Saussurian concept of signification, to highlight the struggle for self-determination of an oppressed community as it is signified-upon by its oppressors through violently imposed discourse. I further question the complicity between conventional forms of narration and the hegemony of an external signifier, and I trace this patterned mechanism of aggression within the linguistic and diegetic fabric of the novel, in order to expose Hurston’s literary methodology of collective memorialization and the way it challenges canonical representations of trauma.

The Memorial of Pain – a TV series comprising 208 episodes – is a memorable documentary produced by the Romanian journalist-filmmaker Lucia Hossu-Longin, which assembles interviews with witnesses and actual victims, and testimonials to the horrors of prisons, forced labour concentration camps, Romanian Securitate’s repressive actions during the communist period, as well as to the atrocities suffered by those suspected of acting against the regime, especially intellectuals. Studies have estimated that two million Romanians were victims of the communist regime, experiencing deportation, confinement to political psychiatric asylums, killings in camps and prisons, imprisonment of war, etc. The present article focuses on the discourse of trauma, while attempting to foreground recurring themes in a set of six, randomly chosen episodes. Moreover, it aims at highlighting linguistic mediation (or the process whereby emotions, traumas, suffering are transferred into discourse) and the associated strategies and symbols which support it. Since emphasis on sociolinguistic topics such as conflict, violence, suffering, traumatic experiences, survivors (frequently taking shape through symbols) is deemed necessary in analyzing mediation (equally viewed as the dialectics between the singular and the collective), the article will look into their representation also.

The problematics of trauma and testimony are perforce in a closely-knit relation with the issue of evil, in particular with the strand of evil that made possible the concentration camps in Auschwitz. Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym will be considered as primarily an event of speech, and its testimony as a mode of truth’s realization beyond what is available as statement. What emerges from the comments on Pym, from the explication of some of the death scenes, from the gratuitousness of the violence, and the nonchalance of Pym’s report, is not the horror, but a sense of the casualness of death, the “banality of evil” that Poe opposes to the “grandeur of evil,” looking ahead to Auschwitz and the Gulag. In Pym, Poe presents us with a rare instantiation of pure (and banal) evil in the casually-reported scene of the cannibalization. I intend to supplement the philosophical response to the question of (banal) evil provided by Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben by a psychoanalytical one, with a footing in the signature terminology of Melanie Klein.

This paper examines the urban space as an ecology of anxiety in post-9/11 literature. After the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima in August 1945, survivors testified of experiencing prior to the bombing an anticipatory trauma known as bukimirooted in the belief that a catastrophic event was forthcoming. Paul K. Saint-Amour suggests that similar experiences to bukimi are not exclusive to the residents of Hiroshima but came to structure post-war urban experience as a result of a nuclear condition wrought by the Cold War. My paper explores whether a contemporary bukimi can be identified in post-9/11 literature. The post-9/11 novel—works which directly or indirectly acknowledge the terrorist attacks—present familiar but ambiguous forms of risk engendered by the threat of terrorism and maintained in the form of an urban-originated anxiety. This anxiety is rooted in the spectre of an event that’s never total or conclusive—an event that promises witness testimony and the maintenance of traumatic memories, but which also eclipses calamitous structures (like global warming) that are gradual and continuous. To unravel this contemporary species of bukimi, my paper examines depictions of the urban space in the post-9/11 literature of Foer and McEwan.

Is anyone listening out there? The artists who write and produce radio dramas believe that a limitless imaginative world is possible. Radio drama is the most flexible of forms, allowing a freedom to experiment usually inhibited by considerations of space, time, and money in live theatre. It is no coincidence that the experimental nature of Caryl Phillips’s radio plays fits perfectly into Brater’s idea of “performative voice” (Brater 1994). Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1985), in particular, illustrates the necessity of filling silence with something, anything at all, by telling the Africans’ trade story and trauma created by way of soundscaping sounds, pauses and silences.

Engaging scholarship pointing to the neocolonial patterns of perception built into East-West relations before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain, as well as compelling questions pertaining to the quasi-colonial status of the countries beyond the Iron Curtain vis-à-vis the Soviet Empire, this paper will focus on the manner in which (post)communist identity in fact forms at the intersection of these sometimes competing, sometimes complementary scenarios of power. Moreover, drawing on Caruth’s and Tal’s work, this paper will suggest ways in which the discourse developed in the field of Trauma Studies holds explanatory and potentially reconciliatory power, as it enables the audience to voice the series of missed or misunderstood encounters that are so often at the buried origin of disturbing memories/memoirs of Eastern Europe (or Romania) in Western (or American) discourse, thus pointing out ways in which interpretative tropes developed in Trauma Studies can be explanatory paradigms that shed light on both (post)communist and Balkan identity discourse. More particularly, invoking a series of early writings on postcommunist identity as well as critical inquiries into Balkanizing or Orientalizing discourse, this paper will explore how one can trace the transformation of individual encounters with (post)communist trauma into collective and then historical memory by borrowing from the field of Trauma Studies the analysis of mechanisms of repetition hovering around the site of trauma.

How can we deal with trauma in a posthuman world? The 9th of September 2001 will be remembered as the day the world changed. The turn of the century in the Western world was signaled by this national trauma, but also by a change in the humanist paradigm that very much conditioned the way in which such trauma was experienced and represented. This article explores this intrasection in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Art Spiegelman as they struggle to account for 9/11 through two trauma narratives that signal a matching change in aesthetic approach. Its methodological innovation lies in the application of Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action” to the humanities.

In the present essay, I will take into account some Italian war films made in the 1950s, such as “Carica eroica” (“Heroic Charge”, 1952, Francesco De Robertis), “I sette dell’Orsa maggiore” (“Hell Raiders of the Deep”, 1953, Duilio Coletti), “Mizar - Sabotaggio in mare” (Mizar, 1954, Francesco De Robertis), “Divisione Folgore” (“Folgore Division“, 1954, Duilio Coletti), “La grande speranza” (“Submarine Attack”, 1954, Duilio Coletti) in order to reflect upon their role in building Italy’s memory of its past as well as the perception of Italian war crimes in public opinion. These productions extend a unifying narrative of the war, consolidating the myth of the “good Italian” (“italiani brava gente”). Through the inclusion of the soldier in collective memory by silencing his role as aggressor, Italian combat films participated and consolidated the process of collective amnesia about the fascist regime and how they influenced the way in which Italian viewers constructed a shared sense of the past.

When the world went into lockdown (2020) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the streets and places of socialising became deserted – much like in the opening verse of Lamentations. This prompted a desire to re-read this book in light of the pandemic. The question was asked whether this book, set amidst the calamity of the Babylonian captivity and destruction of Jerusalem, can be helpful. Can this book help us make meaning and sense in the face of a new enemy that threatens the world? The article took note of all the necessary interpretations and introductions to the book of Lamentations and concluded that it can be read as lament and, in particular, communal lament. The language of lament, sometimes lost in a world of technology and positivity, can be helpful to verbalise loss and trauma. This elicited a discussion of trauma and biblical studies, and how they interact. Much of literature that originated in traumatic circumstances became ‘meaning-making literature’. It was the case with Lamentations back in the wake of 586 BCE and also in many other instances when the book was re-read. This article provided examples of these instances. The invitation was then accepted to read some of the verses in Lamentations through the lens of the trauma created by COVID-19, and many similarities were found. Contribution: Although Jerusalem was destroyed by an enemy that could be seen, and COVID-19 is caused by an enemy that cannot be seen, there are many similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the situation in Jerusalem as lamented by Lamentations. As ‘meaning-making literature’, lament is sometimes the only fitting response to the incomprehensible reality of pain and suffering. Lament defies the cheap answers so often given by religion when it is confronted with mystery, doubt and despair. This seemed to be the case in Lamentations. It was concluded that Lamentations can help readers through the process of trauma therapy as it opens the wound and helps the individual to connect with the bigger community in trying to make sense of it all and to involve others in the pain. The newness of the COVID-19 pandemic and a response from an Old Testament perspective, made the scope of this article relevant.

In this article the impact of the Covid-19 virus will be used as a lens to read this Isaianic text. The collective threat of the corona-virus causes trauma on societies and communities on different levels: psychological, physical, existential and communal trauma. Isaiah 7:18–25 also tells us of an historic event which caused extreme trauma to its audience. Verse 18 describes the arrival of the Assyrian army. The prophet compares the Assyrian hosts to the flies “in the rivers of Egypt”, and to the bees in Assyria; that is to say, the invaders will be the innumerable and speedy warriors of the Assyrian king. This portrayal is expanded stating that the flies and the bees will swarm all over the land, penetrate every corner and crack and it will be impossible to get rid of them. The plague of “flies” in the metaphor represents the large numbers, while the “bees” are clearly the aggressive and terrifying ones in this metaphor. Just as the Assyrians, who are about to appear as an unwanted and troublesome multitude of flies and bees from which Ahaz will be unable to free himself and his kingdom, the Covid-19 virus is causing havoc and wreckage to societies all over the world. Contribution: This article reflects theologically on the immense psychological and existential damage of trauma caused by the terrifying and laming fear this virus has on the mental well-being of a society. The theological reflections will engage with a biblical text which also reflects on the traumatic effects of threat and fear that lamed a society.

This article analyzes Kathy Kacer’s Masters of Silence (2019), a novel about Marcel Marceau – the renowned mime artist who during the war cooperated with the French Resistance – and two fictional Jewish siblings struggling with the trauma of losing their parents, anti-Semitism, and the suppression of identity in a Catholic convent in southern France. The author examines the narrative techniques used by Kacer, including the combination of fiction with history and some elements of the biography of Marceau, and demonstrates that she not only shares the next-generation memory of World War II with her young readers but also depicts nonverbal ways of coping with trauma as potentially effective and empowering. Whereas Kacer’s indifference to historical dates may be connected to her determination to portray Marceau as an adolescent role model, the novel is a successful narrative about trauma and the Holocaust history, and the depiction of Marceau’s acts of resistance does not overshadow the young protagonists who do not just quiver and follow the instructions of the adults but mainly try to gain agency.

The problem of psychological trauma experience in Ian McEwan's novels about the Second World War (“The Innocent” (1990), “Black Dogs” (1992), and “Atonement” (2001)) has been considered in the paper. The plot of violence, “traumatic” situation, and flashback problem in the context of contemporary literature research has been studied. The correlation of these aspects in McEwan's novels has been revealed. The research confirms that the combination of these components in the novel is complex and diverse. Therefore, it has been shown that the influence of trauma on human's personality varies to a considerable degree. The psychology of traumatized consciousness has been investigated. The victim of trauma is not only the person subjected to violence, but also the one who is the source of the violence. The severity of psychological trauma does not let the author to argue about overcoming the trauma. He can only analyze the influence of global historical events on the conscience of every person taken individually.

This article presents a non-canonical reading of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s canonical novel Don Quixote. Using a trauma theory lens (from both cultural studies and psychiatry) to understand the pre-Don Quixote character Alonso Quijano, this research first advances several new arguments as to why Quijano appears to have endured a traumatic experience of ageing. Instead of interpreting his obsessive behaviour as madness, it is argued that he engages in a form of both individual and collective therapy consisting of reading to educate himself about emotions; engaging the body in adventures; listening to others’ stories of traumatic suffering; and stimulating “empathic unsettlement” toward others and his previously traumatized self, one of the main critical suggestions advanced. This article takes an original turn in trauma studies too by putting forward that Quijano’s therapy is effective because it addresses the “central dialectic of psychological trauma.” He embarks on an imaginative and collective adventure of self-identity, transforming himself into another who is exempt from the traumatic experience; he knows without knowing and speaks without speaking. His trauma therapy occurs outside the reality of trauma or inside the “unreality” of creative expression, and this is how he endures a traumatic experience of ageing.

The notion of trauma is widely used in contemporary research on literature, film, music, and other forms of cultural production in the Arab world. Building on a tradition of trauma studies in the humanities, much of this work is predicated on an essentialist, naturalized notion of trauma as developed in the seminal work of the literary scholar Cathy Caruth, among others. In this article I suggest that such a notion of trauma is problematic as it depoliticizes human suffering and marginalizes non-hegemonic ways of dealing with experiences of violence. In order to address these problems, I propose to turn to social constructivist approaches to trauma.

After interrogating the (non-)referential status of the Holocaust for Asians, this essay examines Frank Ephraim’s Escape to Manila and Juergen Goldhagen’s Manila Memories. In particular, cross-traumatic affiliation is studied between two groups of people: the Manilaner and the Manileños: the former were Europeans who fled Nazism and sought refuge in Manila; the latter were Filipino residents of Manila who, during the Second World War, found themselves under Japanese Occupation. A closer reading of the memoirs, however, also reveals latent orientalism in the portrayal of Filipinos. This essay thus echoes present postcolonial concerns in recent Trauma Studies research which ask the place of serial colonisations, martial law, climate catastrophes and the sacred in Trauma theory.

Dominant theorizations of cultural trauma often appeal to the twinned notions of “recognition” and “solidarity”, suggesting that by inviting readers to recognize distant suffering, trauma narratives enable forms of cross-cultural solidarity to emerge. This paper explores and critiques that argument with reference to postcolonial literature. It surveys four areas of postcolonial trauma, examining works that narrate traumatic experiences of the colonized, colonizers, perpetrators and proletarians. It explores how novelists locate traumatic affects in the body, and suggests that Frantz Fanon’s model of racial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remains essential for the interpretation of postcolonial texts, including those to which it is not usually applied. The analysis further reveals tensions between different texts’ appeals for recognition, and suggests that these tensions problematize the claim that solidarity will emerge from sympathetic engagement with trauma victims. As such, the paper makes three key arguments: first, that trauma offers a productive ground for comparing postcolonial fiction; second, that comparison uncovers problems for theorists attempting to “decolonize” trauma studies; and third, that trauma theory needs to be supplemented with systemic material analyses of particular contexts if it is not to obfuscate what makes postcolonial traumas distinct.

The text “The Book of Exit” delineates a perspective of animal studies understood as a consequence of the trauma theory and the Holocaust studies. At the foundations of the article are the views of Dominick LaCapry from 2004-2014, included by the author in the context of the current Polish and American cultural debates. In this interpretation the posthumanities and monster studies—vividly developing nowadays—are not only transformation but also overpower the melancholy of studies into trauma, completed at the price of parting from an individualistically crafted version of a liberal subject.

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el recurso sistemático a la referencia literaria en la obra narrativa de Jorge Semprún, tomando como objeto de estudio L’écriture ou la vie (1994). Lejos de ser una mera ilustración su propio capital cultural, la alusión y cita a otros autores será conceptualizada como una expresión del trauma propio de la experiencia concentracionaria por cuanto evidencia una necesidad de diluir su individualidad en la voz ajena. El resultado es una obra escrita a diversas manos en la que la referencia literaria intertextual se convierte en la marca de un silencio personal y en un ejercicio narrativo contra la memoria. The aim of this paper is to explore Jorge Semprún’s systematic use of literary references in his oeuvre, particularly in L’écriture ou la vie (1994). Far from being a mere illustration of the author’s cultural capital, the quotation and allusion to other authors evinces a personal trauma that reflects his own experience in a concentration camp and his need to dissolve his subjectivity in the voice of otherness. The result is a literary work written by multiple hands; one in which the intertextual literary reference becomes the sign of a personal silence as well as a narrative mechanism against memory.

Merlinda Bobis’s second novel is an interesting combination of opposites: of the powerless and the powerful, the holy and the profane, the magical and the seedy, Third-World Asian poverty and white Western affluence. The Solemn Lantern Maker is a traumatized mute 10-year-old boy who lives with his crippled mother in the slums of Manila. One day, when trying to sell his colourful wares, he becomes involved in the life of a grieved American tourist who is caught up in a murder of a controversial journalist. In this post-9/11 climate, this event will soon be wrongly interpreted as a terrorist conspiracy. My paper will rely on some of the most relevant assumptions put forward by ethical criticism and trauma studies to show that Bobis’s novel succeeds in illustrating how the powerful world of international politics can inadvertently impinge on the small world of an insignificant Third-World child, and how the love and care that this child offers to an unknown distressed westerner eventually manages to play the miracle of transforming the latter’s life, thus making it clear that Bobis’s allegory of traumatic cross-cultural encounters testifies to the power of the (un)common to render the invisible visible, and of the unselfish circulation of affect to effect unexpected changes in an apparently indifferent globalized world.

Mostly addressed to novice scholars and instructors, this paper discusses some of the implications that the concepts of Theoretical Framework and Method of Analysis have for the field of Literary Studies. The limits between the two notions are unclear, which may lead to inconsistent teaching results or rejection of research proposals. The paper suggests a tentative definition for these yet unresolved conceptual issues. Then, it provides an example of the working of framework and method applied to Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Stress is given to the fact that in Literary Studies the frame and method deployed by the scholar should not be confused with the frame and method used by the author whose work constitutes the corpus of analysis.

This interview of Tammy Berberi, Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, discusses the advent and challenges of disability studies in the United States and in Europe.

The task of identifying main hallmarks of Ishiguro’s and Kawabata’s oeuvres is but of double-edged nature – one may be unconsciously driven to seemingly obvious and unequivocal categorisations, naming attempts at selfunderstanding and self-interpretation as the core of their narratives. Both writers are associated with highly poeticised, sensual, and atmospheric explorations of the past long gone. They thoroughly investigate and comment upon one’s personal loss, alienation, displacement, or falling into obsolescence. They depict the worlds that perished once and for all, simultaneously making them a mythologised locus of ultimate contentment, plenitude, and fulfilment. In this sense, the past is superimposable onto the present – it develops into a safe haven formed out of one’s innermost feelings and memories, a place where one takes refuge in one’s reminiscences. This paper surveys the role of memory, nostalgia, and loss in Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, and Kawabata’s work from his mature period, The Sound of the Mountain. The former, a veritable attempt at recreating and re-orientalising the Orient, is subjected to a comparative analysis with the publication often assessed as the pinnacle of post-war Japanese literature. Characterial disintegration, dissociative symptoms, and affectivity that are present in both novels are analysed as determinants of their fragmentary narrative structure.

The present paper is a first reflection on the ideal approaches to study the corpus of lagernaia memuaristika. The author proposes the novel concept of ‘Soviet repression literature’ as a new key concept to study the whole corpus of literature related to Soviet repression under a genre perspective. In this context, the author stretches the peculiarities of Gulag memoirs in relation to the corpus of Soviet repression literature, and underlines how trauma studies and autobiographical studies might help assessing the corpus.

This article deals with second-generation Holocaust literature, i.e. writings belonging to the generation born after the Holocaust and grown up in its aftermath. Specifically I dwell on two considerably different Jewish-American novels, which reflect two different natures of Holocaust inheritance and, hence, two distinct paths, featuring second-generation Holocaust literature: Thane Rosenbaum’s Second-Hand Smoke (1999) and Irene Dische’s Pious Secrets (1991). My understanding of these narratives is grounded in the cultural distinction between particularist and universalist second-generation Holocaust writers outlined by Alan Berger in Children of Job, American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (1997). The argument that I present interprets Rosenbaum’s novel as a particularist depiction of the Holocaust legacy, whereas Dische’s book is associated to a universalist perspective towards this event and its inheritance.

It is tempting to consider that trauma studies, in view of its insistence that “the history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another” —with the result that “we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (Caruth)— may offer a reclamatory purchase on the flip side of Australian history. Yet my impression is that trauma theory does not travel easily to the settler colonies, where there is a risk that it might be called upon to perform the service of allowing the beneficiaries of conquest to masquerade as its victims. Trauma studies does flourish within cultures that have a stake in investing the experience of suffering with the value of moral capital. In Australia, such gesturing towards the dividends of suffering can never be wholly divorced from the felt (il)legitimacy of the settlers’ occupation of stolen territories. The notion of “trauma envy” (Mowitt) indexes the structure of feeling that seeks a wound to legitimate itself morally, in keeping with the unchanging agenda of neo-colonial identity politics. My essay attempts not to lose sight of this ethical quandary when examining the slippages which occur in specific discursive instances in contemporary Australia.