1. Seeing Ghosts: Theorizing Haunting in Literary Texts

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Introduction: Life Writing in an Age of Trauma 1
4. Part One: Life Writing and Trauma: Theorizing the Vicissitudes of Representing Violence
5. 1. Seeing Ghosts: Theorizing Haunting in Literary Texts 21
6. 2. Trauma and Utopia: Benjamin, Adorno, and Elie Wiesel’s Night 45
7. Part Two: Auto/biographies as Trauma Narratives
8. 3. Richard Wollheim’s Germs: Life Writing as Therapy, Despite Theory 85
9. 4. Writing Childhood, Writing Lack 101
10. 5. Loquacious Silences: Vikram Seth’s Two Lives and the German Language 107
11. 6. Unsayable or Merely Unsaid? 123
12. 7. Voicing Trauma in the Deportation Narratives of Baltic Women 129
13. 8. Trauma Narratives and National Identity 152
14. Part Three: Limit-cases: Exploring the Limits of Telling Pain
15. 9. “Metaphors for the Scots Today”: History and National Identity in Scottish Drama after 1945 161
16. 10. Aspects of Post-Imperial Constructions of Nationhood 179
17. 11. Anecdotalization of Memory in Jaan Kross’s Paigallend 187
18. 12. Meddling with Memory – Negating Grand Narratives 203
19. 13. Fighting Fear with Writing: Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster and Ene Mihkelson’s Ahasveeruse uni (The Sleep of Ahasuerus) 211
20. 14. The Stigma of the Autobiographical 225
21. 15. The Search for the Lost Parent in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Ene Mihkelson’s Ahasveeruse uni (The Sleep of Ahasuerus) 230
22. 16. Making the Silence Speak: A Critical Discussion of Trauma Transmission and Identity Formation 245
23. Part Four: Fictions of Loss and Trauma
24. 17. (Re-)Visions of the Buried Self: Childhood Trauma and Self-Narration in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye 257
25. 18. Grasping Patterns of Violence 275
26. 19. Nostalgia and Redemption in Bernard Kangro’s Joonatan Novels 279
27. 20. Renegotiations of Longing and Belonging: Exile, Memory, and Nostalgia 297
28. 21. Haunted Whispers from the Footnotes: Life Writing in Raj Kamal Jha’s Fireproof 305
29. 22. What Only Fiction Can Do 316
30. Afterword: Ethical and Political Aspects of Life Writing and Remembering 321
31. Contributors 335
32. Index 339