Eszter Enikő Mohácsi: Trauma, Literature, and Culture

Article

DOI 10.51313/Freeside-2021-5

There has been a particular interest in trauma studies since the end of the twentieth century; not just in psychology and psychiatry, the main fields of study concerning mental disorders, but in every aspect of life. Consequently, a growing number of publications have been published that approach trauma from various fields: social and literary studies, comparative literature, philosophy, ethics, etc. At the same time, from talk shows to the news broadcasts, from popular media (post-apocalyptic movies, disaster films, games to art movies), from direct testimonies of survivors to fictive accounts of traumatic experience, there is a proliferation of all kinds of representations of trauma to the extent that testimony has been suggested as “the literary mode […] of our times”, whereas “our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony” (Felman 1995: 17). The question naturally arises whether trauma has become a cliché in contemporary literature and culture, or whether literature has always been centered around trauma, in which case only the approach of trauma studies is new.