&quotTthis is my opa. do you remember him killing the Jews?"

Rachel Seiffert's "micha" and the transgenerational haunting of a silenced past

Maria J. Martínez-Alfaro

pp. 115-131

in: Siân Adiseshiah, Rupert Hildyard (eds), Twenty-first century fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association included in the new edition of its official diagnostic manual the symptom indicators for an illness they called "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" (PTSD). This was a landmark event in the development of contemporary trauma studies. Following this, a number of scholars — Shoshana Felman, Judith L. Herman, Lawrence L. Langer, Geoffrey Hartman, Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, among others — published key works on the subject that deepened and furthered trauma studies in the humanities. Thus, the concept of trauma gradually travelled from medical and scientific discourse to the humanities in general and to the field of literary studies in particular. While narratives of loss, oppression and trauma are by no means new, there is no denying that in the last twenty years "the particular dedication of the humanities to these issues has reached a new quality" (Modlingler and Sonntag, 2011, p. 1). In this context, the attempt to identify a distinct "trauma novel" has been a recent literary critical task. As Roger Luckhurst puts it, there is by now "an emergent international canon of writers and works, and even an implicit aesthetic for the trauma novel" (2008, p. 87). However, he adds, this is a literary category that is still developing. Anne Whitehead's identification of it as an "emerging genre" (2004, p. 4) in her groundbreaking Trauma Fiction is another indication that we are yet to see its full extent.

Cited authors

Whitehead Alfred North

American Psychiatric Association

Luckhurst Roger