Towards a Poetics of Trauma and Healing: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014)
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Katalin Schober
Abstract
This article argues that contemporary tales of trauma and healing, such as Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life (2015) or Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk (2014), model aesthetic structures akin to narrative therapy approaches used in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. Their readers are asked to imaginatively partake in and to distance themselves from these narratives at the same time. This complex reading process parallels elements of a therapeutic conversation. Interpreting the aforementioned texts is certainly not identical with trauma therapy as such, but there are relevant points of encounter. The aim of this paper is to retrace the intersections between exemplary narrative texts and central premises of trauma therapy by looking at structural similarities.
References
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Introduction
- The Aesthetics and Politics of Psychotherapy: Literary, Cultural, and Media Perspectives on ‘Healing the Soul’
- Articles
- Section I: Psychotherapy and Serial Television
- Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Aesthetics of Serial Narration in The Sopranos (1999–2007)
- Section II: Narratives of Psychotherapy
- The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”
- Towards a Poetics of Trauma and Healing: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014)
- Section III: Theatre and/as Psychotherapy
- Theatre and Communal Movement as Forms of Trauma Therapy in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007)
- Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)
- Book Reviews
- Stefanie Schäfer: Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
- Marzia Milazzo: Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power.
- Julia Leyda: Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious
- Alexandra Hartmann: The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti-Racist Literature: A Fragile Hope
- Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma: City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Introduction
- The Aesthetics and Politics of Psychotherapy: Literary, Cultural, and Media Perspectives on ‘Healing the Soul’
- Articles
- Section I: Psychotherapy and Serial Television
- Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Aesthetics of Serial Narration in The Sopranos (1999–2007)
- Section II: Narratives of Psychotherapy
- The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”
- Towards a Poetics of Trauma and Healing: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014)
- Section III: Theatre and/as Psychotherapy
- Theatre and Communal Movement as Forms of Trauma Therapy in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007)
- Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)
- Book Reviews
- Stefanie Schäfer: Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
- Marzia Milazzo: Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power.
- Julia Leyda: Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious
- Alexandra Hartmann: The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti-Racist Literature: A Fragile Hope
- Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma: City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures
