Trauma Narratives and Herstory

Abstract

This book has been prompted by the contemporary interest in Trauma Studies, a field that has become increasingly significant in critical discourse since its appearance in the 1990s. Following the ‘ethical turn’ in the criticism of the 1980s, Trauma Studies emerged in the United States in the 1990s as an important critical trend. According to Roger Luckhurst, this was the period ‘when various lines of inquiry converged to make trauma a privileged critical category’ (2006, p. 497). From that moment onwards trauma theory has addressed both public and private questions that are pertinent for psychology, philosophy, ethics and aesthetics, and it combines resources from a number of critical schools, including Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism, New Historicism and deconstruction (Onega, 2009, p. 196). Going back to its origins, contemporary critics associated with Yale University in the 1990s, such as Cathy Caruth, Geoffrey Hartman and Shoshana Felman, attempted to adapt medical ideas on psychic traumatic processes to the analysis of narrative texts, thus launching Trauma Studies. Already in 1995, Hartman argued that ‘there is something very contemporary about Trauma Studies reflecting our sense that violence is coming ever nearer, like a storm — a storm that may have already moved into the core of our being’ (in Luckhurst, 2006, p. 503). In one of his subsequent articles ‘Trauma within the Limits of Literature’ (2003), Hartman explained that the main purpose of this discipline was to uncover the traumatic traces in the textual elements of literary works since, according to him, the effects of traumatic processes can be recognised in the narrative mechanisms employed in many different genres.