Miten analysoida sitä, mistä ei voi kertoa? – Käsikirja humanistiseen traumatutkimukseen

Abstrakti

Colin Davis & Hanna Meretoja (eds): Routlegde Companion to Literature and Trauma. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2020, 496 pages.

English summary of the review

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, edited by Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja, introduces the reader thoroughly to the history and philosophies of trauma, theory and concepts of the field, and offers a variety of analyses of literary texts from the point of view of trauma. The introduction of the handbook is thought-provoking, cohesive, and summarizes well a broad field of studies and its history. One of its strengths is including the main critiques of the field, too.

The chapters of the handbook offer ways to use concepts, such as perpetrator trauma and intersectionality, in analysis and suggest ways to develop them further. A section on future directions of the field includes viewpoints on postcolonialism, critical posthumanism and new materialism. As trauma studies has been criticized for its Eurocentric bias and failure to recognise the suffering of non-Western others, perhaps some silences of marginalized people in the analysed texts or their contexts could have been brought forward even more explicitly in the handbook.