Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Introduction

   • Susana Onega, Constanza del Río, Maite Escudero-Alías

   Pages 1-17

3. The Ideological and Aesthetic (Re)construction of Cultural Memory in Early Twentieth-Century Literature

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

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   2. Memory and Appropriation: Remembering Dante in Germany During the Sexcentenary of 1921

      • Martin Elsky

      Pages 21-45

   3. On Poetic Violence: W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and César Vallejo’s “Vusco volvvver de golpe el golpe”

      • David Lloyd

      Pages 47-69

4. Ethical and Aesthetic Challenges in the Representation, Transmission and Teaching of the Holocaust

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 71-71

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   2. Holocaust Trauma Between the National and the Transnational: Reflections on History’s “Broken Mirror”

      • Larissa Allwork

      Pages 73-100

   3. Wandering Memory, Wandering Jews: Generic Hybridity and the Construction of Jewish Memory in Linda Grant’s Works

      • Silvia Pellicer-Ortín

      Pages 101-125

   4. “Fighting Trauma”: Silencing the Past in Alan Scott Haft’s Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano

      • Rudolf Freiburg

      Pages 127-151

5. Romance Strategies and Spectrality in the Fictional Representation of Traumatic Memories

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 153-153

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   2. Medieval Romance After HIV and AIDS: The Aesthetics of Innocence and Naïveté and the Postmodern Novel

      • Justin Paul Brumit

      Pages 155-180

   3. Remembrance Between Act and Event: Anne Enright’s The Gathering

      • Jean-Michel Ganteau

      Pages 181-200

   4. Class Trauma, Shame and Spectrality in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger

      • Susana Onega

      Pages 201-225

6. Dislocated Lives and Narratives: Hybridity, Liminality and the Testimonial Representation of Traumatic Memories in a Postcolonial Context

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 227-227

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   2. On Exile, Memory and Food: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love, Migration and Food

      • Anna Maria Tomczak

      Pages 229-249

   3. Self-Representation and the (Im)Possibility of Remembering in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and Mr. Potter

      • Bárbara Arizti

      Pages 251-277

   4. Trauma, Screen Memories, Safe Spaces and Productive Melancholia in Toni Morrison’s Home

      • Katrina Harack, Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz

      Pages 279-310

   5. Conclusion

      • Constanza del Río, Susana Onega, Maite Escudero-Alías

      Pages 311-316

7. Back Matter

   Pages 317-331

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This volume addresses the construction and artistic representation of traumatic memories in the contemporary Western world from a variety of inter- and trans-disciplinarity critical approaches and perspectives, ranging from the cultural, political, historical, and ideological to the ethical and aesthetic, and distinguishing between individual, collective, and cultural traumas. The chapters introduce complementary concepts from diverse thinkers including Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Abraham and Torok, and Joyce Carol Oates; they also draw from fields of study such as Memory Studies, Theory of Affects, Narrative and Genre Theory, and Cultural Studies.

Traumatic Memory and the Political, Economic, and Transhistorical Functions of Literature addresses trauma as a culturally embedded phenomenon and deconstructs the idea of trauma as universal, transhistorical, and abstract.

• Trama
• Cultural Memory
• Literature
• Memory Studies
• European Literature
• American Literature

“The volume makes a very welcome contribution to the growing field of postcolonial trauma theory with a number of excellent individual contributions, well-supported by a focus on detailed close reading.” (Alexander Hope, Miscelánea, Vol. 60, 2019) “The present volume explores anew the complex aesthetic relationship between trauma and memory. The various essays, written by an outstandingly diverse body of scholars—in terms of nationalities and theoretical perspective— have it in common to rethink the question of the representation of trauma: while stemming from a highlighting attention to seminal psychoanalytical and philosophical texts, they convincingly argue for an inclusion of ethical and political dimensions that will delve at the core of fiction and its specific means of expression and strategies. Never swerving from valuable textual close reading, the authors decidedly and often boldly explore the limits of previous theories the better to promote challenging multidisciplinary reflections on the particularities of “Trauma fiction” in a strikingly optimistic way, focusing on what remains rather than what is lost: a deconstruction of various preconceptions that entails and promotes a much needed revisitation of the function of literature.” (Marc Amfreville, Professor of American Literature and Trauma Studies at Paris-Sorbonne University)

“Bringing together current scholarly debates on trauma, memory, and affect, this volume makes an original contribution to research on twentieth-century and contemporary literature. It forcefully demonstrates how productively the arts contribute to major cultural challenges, ranging from the Holocaust to the legacy of the colonial system. Individual essays address traumatic memories in various European countries and beyond, revealing the richness of formal strategies employed by writers to evoke and abate the personal and collective spectres as they relate to cultural memory.” (Gerd Bayer, Professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Erlangen-Nüremberg)

• Department of English and German Philology, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

  Susana Onega, Constanza del Río, Maite Escudero-Alías

Susana Onega is Professor of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza. She has written on the work of contemporary writers, narrative theory, and  ethics and trauma; and is the author of five monographs, including Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (1989, Winner of the Enrique García Díez Research Award), Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd (1999), and Jeanette Winterson (2006, Shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English Book Award, 2008).

Constanza del Río is Senior Lecturer in British and Irish Literature at the University of Zaragoza. Her research centers on contemporary Irish fiction, narrative and critical theory, and popular narrative genres. She is co-editor of Memory, Imagination and Desire in Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and Film (2004).

Maite Escudero-Alías is Senior Lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, where she teaches English Literature. Her main research interests centre on contemporary literary criticism, feminism, queer and affect theory in literature, and culture. She is the author of Long Live the King: A Genealogy of Performative Genders (2009) and has published in the Journal of Gender Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Lesbian Studies, The Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and Journal of International Women’s Studies, among others. 

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