Conclusion

Abstract

The essays collected in the volume, written by scholars from different countries, provide a variety of critical approaches to violence and traumatic memory as represented in a wide range of texts from a several Western countries (United Kingdom, United States, France, Germany, Poland, Ireland, Italy and Spain). Put together, they offer complementary outlooks on the rhetorics of violence, the effects of traumatic experiences, both individual and collective, and the role of memory in helping restore subjectivity and building a sense of cultural bonding. The analyses draw on the most relevant concepts and themes discussed in Trauma Theory and Memory Studies, such as the relationship between individual and collective trauma, historical trauma, the roles of perpetrator and victim, dissociation, Nachträglichkeit, postmemory, multidirectional memory and cultural memory, as well as the relationship among violence, language and the law. The topics explored in the essays tackle diverse representations of violence and traumatic memory as they develop both in place and time throughout the twentieth century to the present, with a stronger focus on late twentieth- and twenty-first century fictional and testimonial narratives. The thematic emphasis mainly falls on the issue of literary representation and consequently most of the essays touch upon formal readings. In the different articles, literary conventions (poetic, narrative, generic) function as specific codes which allow for the representation of violence and trauma through a rhetorics of indirection, repetition and excess that shifts value and meaning in terms of the conventions used. This has a double effect: on the one hand, it highlights literature’s seminal role in the transhistorical process of coming to terms with traumatic memories and, on the other, it questions the usual notion within the field of Trauma Studies that experimental texts are best equipped to deal with the shattering effects of trauma.