Prof. Susana Onega (Zaragoza University, Spain)
Experimentalism, Empathic Unsettlement and the Ethics of Affects in Trauma Fiction
Starting from the hypothesis that trauma is the paradigm of our post-1945 age, the lecture situates the birth of trauma studies within the general “turn to ethics” that took place in 1980s in the related fields of literary theory and philosophy, and argues for a widening of the traditional definition of trauma fiction as the representation of a collective trauma caused by an extraordinary historical event, through the incorporation of Roger Luckhurst’s notion of narrative possibility, or the potential for the configuration and refiguration of trauma in narrative. Bearing in mind Jean-Michel Ganteau’s definition of the new baroque, the essay contends that experimental novels like Peter Ackroyd’s English Music and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem; Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters; J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country; Will Self’s Dorian; or Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion and The Stone Gods respond to the trauma paradigm in the aesthetic and ethical terms described by Ganteau, Bennett, Ricœur, Hartman and Waugh as works of fiction seeking to respond to the trauma paradigm by creating a fully troped and overtly fictional narrative language of sensation and affect in Emmanuel Levinas’ definition of the term, capable of shocking readers into a sensorial and affective awareness of our dehumanized condition and of opening up a more harmonious and ethical way of being-in-the-world.
Prof. Susana Onega is Professor of English Literature at the Dept. of English and German Studies of Zaragoza University. She is the former President of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN) and the former Spanish Board member of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE). She was granted the title of Honorary Research Fellow at Birkberck College (Univ. of London) in 1996.
