Showing papers in "Journal of Literary Studies in 2013"

A Zombie Apocalypse: Opening Representational Spaces for Alternative Constructions of Gender and Sexuality

Abstract: SummaryZombies have become an increasingly common figure in contemporary cultural landscapes around the world and South Africa is no exception While scholars have tended to shy away from engaging with post-apocalyptic zombie fiction, this has started to change as it became apparent that these texts offer rich possibilities for exploring alternative constructions of gender and sexuality In the aftermath of an apocalypse, most forms of social organisation and ideological constructions are decimated and survivors are able to imagine new ways of constructing sexual and gender identities as they go about reconstituting their social worlds By means of a feminist literary analysis of Lily Herne’s Deadlands (2011) and Death of a Saint (2012), this article explores whether these zombie texts successfully capitalise on the post-apocalyptic social ruptures in terms of their representations of gender and sexuality It emerges that, although the texts do suggest alternative constructions, they also reinscribe and r

Miguel de Cervantes and J.M. Coetzee: An Unacknowledged Paternity

Abstract: SummaryThis article points to the 17th-century Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, as one important literary predecessor of the contemporary South African writer, J.M. Coetzee, a relation that has generally passed unnoticed among critics. This relation is brought to the foreground in Coetzee’s most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), but it also underlies his previous ones, Age of Iron (1998), Disgrace (2000), and Slow Man (2005), as well as his critical pieces, “The Novel Today” (1988) and the “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech” (1992b), all of which contain echoes of Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote ([1605, 1615]2005). My argument is that the conflict between imagination and reality, the novel and history, central in Coetzee’s fictional and non-fictional production, needs to be re-examined as a fundamentally Cervantine one. The adventures and fate of Don Quixote lie behind Coetzee’s exploration of whether literature may be an effective and ethical guide in our dealings with reality, whethe...

Remembering the Self: Fragmented Bodies, Fragmented Narratives in Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf and Agaat

Abstract: Summary This article explores the significance of the motif of bodies in fragments in Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf (1999) and Agaat (2006). It argues that van Niekerk's protagonists “speak” of their trauma primarily through their wounded bodies. The correlation between corporeal and narrative fragmentation is explored to determine whether remembering (or re-membering) can prove salutary. In both Triomf and Agaat, it is only when characters are faced with the irrefutable evidence of trauma as wrought upon one another's bodies that they are forced to reckon with the truth of their familial narratives. Their fragmented bodies belie any “saving perspective” (van Niekerk 1999: 175), which might gloss over such horror. While Louise Bethlehem proposes that the scar is the “amanuensis of violence” (2006: 83), this article seeks to investigate whether there is anything potentially empowering in the revelation of scars, regardless of their origin. It considers how intimate relationships are implicated in working th...

Masculinities and femininities in Zimbabwean autobiographies of political struggle : the case of Edgar Tekere and Fay Chung

Abstract: SummaryBecause masculinities and femininities are socially and culturally constructed, they often play significant roles in constructing identities and distinguishing one another. Femininities and masculinities therefore play a key role in nation-building and in the sustenance of national identities. In this article I explore, through the autobiographies of two luminaries of Zimbabwe's liberation war, how individual politicians configure their own gender identities and consequently the masculine and feminine identities of others. I posit that the autobiographical mode allows for intimate gendering of the liberation discourse. I also argue that Tekere celebrates the heroic masculine self, preferring military femininities to domestic ones. He privileges his own masculinity while “feminising” Robert Mugabe. Chung debunks the perceived manliness of political struggle and its representations by hailing the participation of women in the struggle for liberation. Her narration of their femininity is in relation t...

A Story of a /Xam Bushman Narrative

Abstract: SummaryThis article explores the intricate discursive histories that have accompanied the telling, transmission, publication and reception of the narratives in the Bleek and Lloyd collection. I will use as an example the story that David Lewis-Williams calls “The First /Xam Man Brings Home a Young Lion” in his selection of materials from the Bleek and Lloyd Collection, Stories That Float from Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa. I argue that a contemporary reading of the narrative, either in the notebooks or in the form in which it appears in Lewis-Williams's book, has to take into account a series of events and interventions that undermine its ontological unity. These include the performance and reception of the narrative in various real and virtual spaces as well as its recording, transcription, translation and interpretation.

Literature After Ranciére: Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans and Gibson's Neuromancer

Abstract: SummaryIn this article the implications of Jacques Ranciere's far-reaching notions of “the distribution of the sensible”, “dissensus” and the “three regimes of art” (particularly for literature) are explored. Kazuo Ishiguro's roman noir entitled When We Were Orphans and William Gibson's dark science fiction novel Neuromancer are examined to demonstrate the novelty of Ranciere's thought, in terms of which the cherished categories of literary orthodoxy are surpassed. Specifically, Ranciere challenges the usual distinction between premodern “representational literature” and modern self-referential literature, and introduces a radically historical manner of appropriating the art and literature of an era. His distinction between three regimes of art (the “ethical regime of images”, the “representative regime of the arts” and the “aesthetic regime of art”) are fundamental in understanding the capacity of art and literature to contribute discursively to the “(re)distribution of the sensible”, or the symbolic (re...

“Bullets in the Dining Room Table”: The (Im)possibility of Mending Wounds in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract: Summary This article focuses on the significance of wounding in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. Drawing on the thought of the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau Ponty, wounds are shown to be imprinted in the very fabric of Southern life, as they are impregnated in the fleshly tissue that chiasmatically intertwines the perceiver with the perceived world. At the same time, Faulkner's South is deemed to be haunted by the spectres of its violent past, as understood in terms of Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. The mutual enfolding of these two aspects of the novel produces the network of tensions informing the text. In their extended narrative, Quentin and Shreve seek to interpret Southern experience by recapturing the capacity for transcendent choice and action that might have shaped the seemingly impenetrable misfortunes of the Sutpen family. Quentin, in particular, also attempts to render justice to this dislocated history of suffering. However, the redemptive endeavour fails, and the novel re...

Imposing Eliot: On Translating Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk

Abstract: Summary Amongst the contributions to the special edition of the Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir literatuurwetenskap on the oeuvre of Marlene van Niekerk (Volume 25(3) September, 2009), the task of translating her works into English was discussed. This article adopts a critical focus on four instances of the presence of T.S. Eliot's poetry in the translation of her novel Agaat (2004) for the South African English-speaking reader by Michiel Heyns (2006).

“What Used to Lie Outside the Frame”: Boundaries of Photography, Subjectivity and Fiction in Three Novels by J.M. Coetzee

Abstract: SummaryThe concept of frame and its inherent tensions, as addressed by contemporary thinking, is the theoretical focus of this article, which examines representations of photography in three of J.M. Coetzee’s novels (Dusklands ([1974]1983), Age of Iron (1990) and Slow Man (2005)). Photography is treated as a site where Coetzee explores the issues that preoccupy him throughout his work: subjectivity, its boundaries and the possibility of intersubjectivity in relation to the very act of storytelling. The article offers a metaphorical reading of such elements of photography as the blow-up, the negative and digital photography in order to reflect upon Coetzee’s engagement with the possibility of openness to transformation, otherness and futurity implied by both the photographic frame and intersubjectivity in life as well as in fiction.

"Significant Silences" and the Politics of National Reconciliation in Chater's Crossing the Boundary Fence

Abstract: SummaryThe article explores Patricia Chater’s Crossing the Boundary Fence (1988) within the framework of Macherey’s (1978) concept of “significant silences”. I argue that in her representation of the decolonisation of Zimbabwe, the writer circumvents pertinent areas that are central to any discussion of the colonial history of Zimbabwe and the liberation war against colonialism. Among the areas the text is silent on is the role of white people in institutionalising racism in the colony and the contributions of ZAPU and the Ndebele during the war of liberation. These silences are informed by a reconciliation agenda which makes silence integral to its realisation.

Reclaiming Masculinities: Migrant Realism in Bheki Maseko's Stories

Abstract: Summary “[L]ike other phenomena of spiritual culture … [that] preserve for a long time old forms under new conditions”, a Bheki Maseko story reads like “folklore” (Propp 1984: 13). This article considers the significance of storytelling in mediating the depersonalisation that is caused by migrancy in Maseko's Mamlambo and Other Stories (1991). The first section considers the interrelatedness between the aesthetic strategies deployed in the stories and their ability to conjure up possibilities of wholeness. Proposing that this narrative style is “migrant realism”, the discussion shows that integral to Maseko's stories are the representations of how textures of everyday life are reutilised in projects that critically imagine completeness and its possible reinsertion into the forms of bondedness such as the family. The family is presented as severely affected by apartheid's migrant labour policies. It is interesting to observe that those stories in which Maseko deploys skaz, narrators strongly emphasise the ...

“Senses of Silence”: Historical Trauma in To Every Birth Its Blood

Abstract: SummaryThe critical reception of Mongane Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood (1981) has over the years been muted and unbalanced in appreciating the novel as a work of great depth In this article I argue that a significant aspect that has been overlooked in the study of To Every Birth Its Blood is the presence of historical trauma in the novel and how it in turn shapes the novel's textuality Through a rereading of the text, I argue that only in understanding the significance of memory and historical trauma might one arrive at a truer reflection on the novel This intertwinement revolves around the manner in which oppressive laws have rendered South Africa (un)homely for the black population, expressing a sense of dislocation and alienation and a lack of self-worth in the novel's key characters, which change as a new mood and dynamic overwhelm the forlorn atmosphere of the early section to a point at which resistance is posited as the only alternative Crucially, I will demonstrate that rather than being a

Telling it to the Dead: Borderless Communication and Scars of Trauma in Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban

Abstract: Summary Cristina Garcia's novel Dreaming in Cuban (1992) is preoccupied with the three key stages in the title of this volume: “healing, working through, and/or staying in trauma”. This article contextualises the novel by referring to the life history of the character Lourdes Puente and the trauma of her exile and exodus from Cuba. A scar on her stomach inscribes a rape, a miscarriage and her failed attachment to her mother Celia. It is suggested that the scar constitutes a visible representation of her trauma designed to prevent her experiences from remaining permanently repressed and unclaimed. Only when Lourdes starts a series of conversations with her deceased father is she able to relate to the wound/scar and to pose questions about her trauma. This article addresses the traumatically marked literary language used to depict Lourdes's experiential world, and discusses how death, or rather the company of her dead father, turns into a safe space in which she confronts her traumatic past and heals hersel...

“I speak with the Voice of Things to Come”: Reading “The Vietnam Project” Today

Abstract: In this article I argue that a rereading of “The Vietnam Project” allows us to explore the varied functions of what has been dubbed “war-porn” in relation to global image consumption then (with respect to Vietnam) and now (with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan). From renewed interest in depictions of torture in Waiting for the Barbarians to acknowledging swipes at the Bush and Blair administrations in Diary of a Bad Year, recent Coetzee scholarship has been enlivened by debates clustered around the most recent wounding of the American body politic: 9/11. By analysing an earlier piece, which is preoccupied with a conflict for which the wound emerged as the defining trope, I consider the prophetic power of “The Vietnam Project”. I argue that it makes for compelling reading owing to issues such as wounding, trauma, war, its mediatisation, and the associated discourses that continue to haunt the American popular and political imagination.

"Andrea Dworkin Was Probably Turning in Her Grave": Pornography, (Post)feminist Backlash and Contemporary Women's Memoirs

Abstract: Summary In a comment that is perhaps representative of new voices in contemporary feminist criticism, Natasha Walter states that in the 1970s “[a]ll treatments of sexuality in culture were forced to reveal the imprint of sexism”. She concludes that a minority of feminists perceived “any hint of sexuality in culture” as “proof of sexism” (Walter 1999: 112). Now, in the 21st century, the representation of dominant female sexuality, across all mediums of visual and textual expression, predominantly avoids the usual cultural trap of promiscuity; the image of the uncontrolled nymphomaniac, and it is this climate of active female sexual expression and a more inclusive (post)feminist discourse that has seen recent erotic non-fiction memoirs thrive. In this article, I will discuss three recent erotic memoirs: Melissa P.'s One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed (2004), Toni Bentley's The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2006) and Catherine Townsend's Breaking the Rules: Confessions of a Bad Girl (2008). In the co...

Bram Stoker’s Dracula as Saviour: Nietzschean Reading

Abstract: SummaryBram Stoker’s Count Dracula is traditionally and popularly regarded as the villain of Stoker’s classic 1898 novel. Drawing on Nietzsche’s theories on power and morality, as well as on existing theories on late-Victorian England and on the novel itself, this article argues that the famous Count emerges ironically as the novel’s tragic hero. In particular, the preoccupation with appearance and boundaries that in part characterised late-Victorian England will be outlined with reference to Ronald Pearsall’s The Worm in the Bud ([1969]2003) and Prescott and Giorgio’s (2005) research on Dracula, which situates the novel within the late-Victorian climate of anxiety and power.In this process, credence is given to Nietzsche’s theory that morality is a construct borne from humanity’s will to power and not a natural, historic given. As such, judgements formulated around this construct need to be carefully scrutinised and their value questioned. In the same vein, characters cast as either villainous or heroic ...

“In This Wound of Life …”: Dystopias and Dystopian Tropes in Chenjerai Hove’s Red Hills of Home

Abstract: SummaryThis article is a reading of Chenjerai Hove’s poetry volume Red Hills of Home (1985) as a dystopia. It locates this text within the context of the evolving postcolonial realities of the first decade of Zimbabwe’s independence. It argues that the text is informed by a dystopian import and sensibility in which forlornness, hopelessness, angst, bewilderment, pain, and betrayal mark the lived experiences of the mainly subaltern subjects who people its world which is fragmented and framed by larger forces beyond their control. It further argues that Hove mainly employs the figure of a dystopian family, together with the technique of defamiliarisation, to represent not only an existential dystopia, but also a dystopian postcolonial society, and an equally dystopian civilisation. So, it is through dystopia that Hove is able to fashion out a metalanguage with which to critique various aspects of human life and existence, Zimbabwe’s postcolonial conditions, and capitalist modernity. Because of Hove’s nativi...

Under the Government of Sympathy : Sentimental Histories in Catharina Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts.

Abstract: Under the Government of Sympathy : Sentimental Histories in Catharina Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts.

Rehearsing Trauma: The Reader as Interrogator in Prison Narratives

Abstract: Summary Accounts of detention survivors exert pressure on the theoretical framework that reserves a role for the reader in a post-Freudian hermeneutics of catharsis. In analysing the prison narratives of Ruth First and Emma Mashinini, I explore the position of the imagined reader in the complex dynamic at work when writing emerges from a position of woundedness. A reappraisal of the role of the imagined reader is warranted, in order to accommodate both the formative communality that operates in these texts and the complexity of a political context where “the public” is both ally and adversary, simultaneously enabling and complicating a survivor's self-construction.The task of asserting a new self in writing, to contest the criminalising “vocabulary” of the state security system, is both undermined and made all the more urgent by the overwhelming self-doubt which that system induces. Narrative self-construction can be thought of as an appeal as much as an assertion of self. The paradigm of trauma studies p...

A Trauma-Theoretical Reading of Hugues C. Pernath's War Poetry

Abstract: Summary Dominick LaCapra has pointed out that from a trauma-theoretical perspective definitions which are too generally formulated lead to an unstable distinction between victim and commentator. According to LaCapra, the idea that “contemporary culture, or even all history, is essentially traumatic or that everyone in the post-Holocaust context is a survivor” is dubious (LaCapra 2001: x-xii). If LaCapra's findings are interpreted in a narrow sense, only Holocaust victims meet the criteria for traumatic experience. The aim of this article, which focuses on the poetry of the canonical Flemish poet, Hugues C. Pernath (1931-1975), is to establish a pertinent definition that will justify the inclusion of literary projects by certain post-war poets within trauma-theoretical discourse. Pernath was so moved by visiting Auschwitz and living with a Jewish survivor that his notions about humanity were fundamentally shaken. This rupture in his world view, which is also reflected in his poetry, can thus be called trau...

Proverbs in Wole Soyinka's Construction of Paradox in The Lion and The Jewel and Death and The King's Horseman

Abstract: Summary Paradox, which is one means through which conflict is resolved in Soyinka's works, also accounts for the difficulty in interpreting his works. Proverbs play a significant role as a creative tool in the playwright's construction of paradox for the representation of the reality of his society and envisioning a better one. The article focuses on how proverbs have been strategically infused into the plays to lend a paradoxical edge to characterisation and the ironic resolution of conflict in the plays. A critical study of the proverbial idioms employed in the plays (these idioms are critically related to some salient Yoruba proverbs outside the texts) show that the charge of obscurity that is often levelled against Soyinka is attributable to his deployment of the tool of paradox to achieve aesthetic and philosophical significance. The study is informed by an agential approach to literary criticism which makes possible the establishment of connections between authorial intention and the agency of the text.

The Poetics of Sensation in J.M.G. Le Clézio's Onitsha

Abstract: SummaryFrench-Mauritian writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008 and has published over forty novels, is little known in the English-speaking academe where there is virtually no critical work available about his work. This article seeks to remedy this gap of knowledge through a close reading of Onitsha (1997), a novel illustrative of Le Clezio's literary project from the 1990s onward. In Onitsha, Le Clezio is primarily concerned with conveying the texture of varying sensations associated with different experiences in order to connect these experiences to the feelings related to “being in the world”. Textually, this is achieved through the evocation of the main protagonist's experience of the world by way of sensation, and I will show that the quality of affect that results stands for something both contained and specific, and with far-reaching implications. The role of affect in Onitsha and how it is focused on sensations results in a thoroughly original ...

Neo-Victoriaanse literêre soortgenote: Ingrid Winterbach en A.S. Byatt

Abstract: Opsomming Hierdie artikel fokus op die interaksie tussen die letterkunde en die wetenskap soos wat dit neerslag vind in twee eksemplariese tekste, naamlik een deur A.S. Byatt en een deur Ingrid Winterbach. Albei outeurs suggereer in hulle oeuvres 'n skatpligtigheid aan die Victoriaanse outeur George Eliot, en albei tekste onder bespreking, naamlik Angels and Insects (Byatt 1992) asook Karolina Ferreira (Viljoen 1993), word onderle deur 'n herbesoek aan negentiende-eeuse Darwinistiese aannames. Hierdie problematisering van Darwinistiese idees is 'n onderskeidende kenmerk van die Victoriaanse literere tradisie, asook die eietydse genre-permutasie daarvan (naamlik die neo-Victoriaanse romantradisie). Beduidende ooreenkomste tussen die twee tekste het gevolglik aanleiding gegee tot 'n vergelykende lesing waar die interpretatiewe winste van ‘n neo-Victoriaanse genretipering onder meer ondersoek is.

Through a Sheet of Glass: The Ethics of Reading in Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda

Abstract: Summary This article explores the epistemological implications of one of the most striking features in Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda ([1988]1997): its systematic frustration of the expectations of its readers Through an examination of its use of narratorial deception and its skilful deployment of irony, the article argues that the novel prevents readers from occupying a detached position in relation to it and its themes Particular attention is given to its concern with the provisional nature of human ways of seeing, exemplified by the metaphor of glass that is developed throughout the novel Oscar and Lucinda compels readers to reflect on the subject position they take up in relation to it, and, in so doing, on their implication in cultural systems of knowledge that seek to contain and eradicate what is deemed unruly The article suggests, ultimately, that the ethical project in Oscar and Lucinda is performative in nature, and that its success relies on the extent to which it is able to alert readers

Subversion versus Inversion: The Loss of the Carnivalesque in Janet Suzman's The Free State

Abstract: SummaryAccording to Gilbert and Thompkins (1996: 5), postcolonial drama is aimed at dismantling the hierarchies and determinants that create binary oppositions in postcolonial contexts and – according to Young (2001: 4) – also actively transforming the present “out of the clutches of the past”. This dismantling can, however, only occur when the inevitable ambivalence of postcolonial binaries are taken into account (Gilbert & Thompkins 1996: 6). In her text The Free State (2000a), Janet Suzman attempts to appropriate Chekhov's dismantling of power structures in The Cherry Orchard (1904) within the South African context. However, although The Free State is written against the former apartheid regime, it fails to dismantle the hierarchies within its context because it negates the vital carnivalesque subversion of Chekhov's text. Instead of subverting the hierarchies in her context, Suzman merely inverts them. In this article, the concept of the carnival as developed by Mikhail Bakhtin is used to investigate ...

“A Museum of Fifteen Years Ago”: Nostalgia in Three Novels by Douglas Coupland

Abstract: Summary In several of his earlier books, notably Generation X, Douglas Coupland presents his recent past as a lost moral condition and the mid-1970s as the moment of the fall into the confusions of a post-industrial age. His protagonists repeatedly commemorate and mourn the last days of this putative golden age. While it can be argued that there is nothing essentially unique about his X-generation characters’ nostalgia, it is clear that Coupland believes that his characters inhabit a special socio-economic period with unique challenges and losses. Focusing on Generation X (1991), Life After God (1994) and Girlfriend in a Coma (1998), the article examines how Coupland's characters must negotiate between progressive new forms, expressions, anxieties and styles and an older-fashioned, nostalgic attachment to the past and a search for essential meaning, truth and order. Julia Kristeva's concept of the chora and certain ideas of Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard are used to counterpoint and illuminate the d...

“Where the Mask Ends and the Face Begins Is Not Certain”: Mediating Ethnicity and Cheating Geography in Jonny Steinberg's Little Liberia

Abstract: Summary Mixing historical commentary, reportage, biography and personal stories, South African writer Jonny Steinberg takes up the tale of a fractured African nation and its diaspora in Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City (2011) The “little Liberia” founded in New York's urban jungle may have represented, for many of its inhabitants, a way to “cheat geography” by recreating a home away from home, but Little Liberia shows the reader it has not allowed them to cheat history The book deals with the lives of two inhabitants of Park Hill Avenue on Staten Island, where nearly everyone is Liberian Their conflict threatens to implode the community, igniting suspicions and accusations that had been bottled up since their exile The article focuses on the interface of mediated ethnicity and citizenship related to the struggle for power in the diasporic Liberian community on Staten Island Attention is also paid to feelings of identity of Little Liberia's author

Mending Wounds?: Healing, Working through, or Staying in Trauma: An Introduction

Abstract: The articles selected for this volume address the aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions of trauma in southern African and North American contexts Focusing on the material, corporeal embodiment of trauma in wounds and scars (and their psychosomatic analogues), these articles explore the role that these embodied traces of traumatic experiences plays in imagining--or, on the contrary, refusing--the healing and mending of lived traumas To put it differently, these articles trace the strategies through which attempts have been made within various contexts to give closure to trauma and to begin the process of collective or personal healing Trauma studies, as is well known, emerged in the 1990s as an offshoot of ethical and psychoanalytic criticism; like these fields, it was marked by an intense concern with otherness and the challenges it poses to the representational capacities of both language and the visual media Trauma theorists, including Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, and Dominick LaCapra, emphasised accordingly the unrepresentability of major traumas Caruth, for example, argues in Trauma: Explorations of Memory (1995) that trauma disrupts the ordinary mechanisms and representations of consciousness and memory; instead, the traumatic event, dissociated from cognitive and representational processes, returns in the form of flashbacks, repetitive phenomena, and traumatic nightmares According to this view, testimonies of trauma occur through the breakdown of representational forms, and the unleashing or transmission of a traumatised and traumatising otherness Dominick LaCapra notes too that trauma "is a shattering experience that distorts memory", rendering it thereby "vulnerable and fallible in reporting events" (2009: 61) Testimonies, then, are "authenticated or validated" (p 61) through their continued display of the wounds left by the symptomatic effects of trauma What emerges from these discussions as a serious challenge to the possibility of representing trauma is, in fact also, and primarily, a sobering check on attempts to imagine the working-though of traumatic experiences, however hesitant or limited these attempts might be Certainly, trauma theory has consistently rejected the possibility of granting closure to traumas or beginning anew for the subject of trauma These possibilities LaCapra describes as stemming from "a truncated, stereotypical idea of working-through as a facile form of uplift, closure, identity formation, integration of the lost other, taking leave of the past, and denial of loss" (2009: 65) From our perspective, trauma theory's investment in the continuing working-through of traumatic experiences, an investment that also fixes in place and maintains the field's disciplinary subject, raises more questions than it answers While acknowledging and consenting to trauma theory's caution against investing overhastily in accounts of the working-through or mending of trauma, the contributors to this volume are not inclined to dismiss too hurriedly accounts of healing, mending, reconciliation, reparation and the overcoming of trauma Nor are they ready to concede out of hand that trauma remains unrepresentable: wounds and scars, after all, materialise and give visual form to traumatic experiences in the here-and-now, granting them a degree of corporeality and tactility That is not to say that this embodiment of trauma necessarily makes the traumatic experience more interpretable or assimilable; it relocates it to a sphere non-identical to consciousness and memory, however, and thereby enables a potentially different relationship to traumatic experiences from those privileged by trauma theory The narratives concerning the healing and mending of wounds addressed in this volume also suggest that trauma theory has given premature closure to discussions concerning the efficacy of working through traumas Gabriele Schwab notes that traumatic writing offers a paradox: there are traumatic experiences that are unrepresentable, yet narrative, storytelling, and testimonies "are necessary for healing trauma" (2010: 48) …