Project MUSE®: Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/572
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies.daily12026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2012) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of Literature and Trauma StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies2045-47402162-3627Latest articles in Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Mapping Anxiety in Palestinian Literary Railways
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966706
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Fouad was an employee at the railway company. He arrived late one morning and the train had already started to pull out of the station. He jumped, hung on to one of the doors and tried to get on, but his hands failed him. He slipped and he fell on the tracks. Tender youth turned into an unrecognizable lump of flesh under the train’s heartless wheels.If we read Samira Azzam’s 1963 short story as a “classic” railway tale, it might be easy to misrecognize the death of Fouad— on his way to work at the railway company— as the representation of a symbolic slip from order and rationality into the horrific chaos of a gruesome death. This symbolic slip would represent a core Anglo-European anxiety, an anxiety that drove the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/572/image/coversmallMapping Anxiety in Palestinian Literary Railways2025-07-26text/htmlen-USMapping Anxiety in Palestinian Literary Railways2025-07-262025TWOProject MUSE®1111992026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-07-26“Post-Desire . . .Post-Good and Evil”: Counter-Affect and the Re-Traumatized Memory in Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966707
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This article examines gender and political traumas in Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian (2021). It argues that failed political activism is not necessarily the outcome of the outside social constraints, but personal traumas hinder resistance and prevent successful emotional affect. It examines what I refer to as a traumatic counter-affect that works in the opposite direction: from the personal to the collective. Expending on Nouri Gana’s argument on the “materializations of an after-naksa-affect” in Arabic literature and films, and his brief analysis of Mabkhout’s novel in Melancholy Acts (2023), the article uses an approach that “places a model of unconscious emotional fears and cognitively distorting mechanisms of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/572/image/coversmall“Post-Desire . . .Post-Good and Evil”: Counter-Affect and the Re-Traumatized Memory in Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian2025-07-26text/htmlen-US“Post-Desire . . .Post-Good and Evil”: Counter-Affect and the Re-Traumatized Memory in Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian2025-07-262025TWOProject MUSE®790762026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-07-26Coping, Resilience, and Post-Traumatic Growth in Shiga Izumi’s Mujō no kami ga maioriru (2017)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966708
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This investigation is a study of Shiga Izumi’s Mujō no kami ga maioriru (2017) as an example of a testimonial narrative of the Tōhoku triple catastrophe that hit Japan on March 11, 2011.1 In particular, the analysis takes a multidisciplinary approach bringing together literary criticism, social anthropology, and positive psychiatry to underline the themes of coping, resilience, and post-traumatic growth in the novel(s). In doing so, this study explores the role of Japanese culture-specific elements of mujō (impermanence) and kizuna (emotional ties), which have served as catalysts for individual and social recovery after the Tōhoku triple disaster. By exploring how the concepts of impermanence and human ties are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/572/image/coversmallCoping, Resilience, and Post-Traumatic Growth in Shiga Izumi’s Mujō no kami ga maioriru (2017)2025-07-26text/htmlen-USCoping, Resilience, and Post-Traumatic Growth in Shiga Izumi’s Mujō no kami ga maioriru (2017)2025-07-262025TWOProject MUSE®831132026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-07-26Incest and the Anti-Psychoanalytic in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966709
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In the year 1898, incest became a fiction. Sigmund Freud, after years developing his so-called seduction theory, which traced an etiology of hysterical and neurotic symptoms back to sexual abuse in early childhood, decided to abandon the model and pivot instead to the now-familiar psychoanalytic schema of “infantile sexuality.” The reasons for his abandonment were manifold. First, he found the seduction theory insufficiently productive; within its framework he felt unable to “bring a single analysis to a real conclusion.”1 Secondly, the disproportionate representation of fathers among reported abusers would mean acknowledging the gender disparity inherent in sexual abuse and grappling with a new perspective of male
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/572/image/coversmallIncest and the Anti-Psychoanalytic in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook2025-07-26text/htmlen-USIncest and the Anti-Psychoanalytic in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook2025-07-262025TWOProject MUSE®781702026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-07-26The Haunting Past: Exploring Jude’s Trauma and Stigma in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966710
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Trauma, in its broadest sense, refers to an individual’s response to an impactful and distressing experience that is initially incomprehensible but later manifests itself as recurring flashbacks, nightmares, or intrusive thoughts.1 Trauma is recognized as a potential determining factor in the development of a victim’s characters,2 resulting in psychotic-like experiences in adolescence3 and exerting lasting functional effects and deficits across the victims lifespan.4 It is evident that traumatic experiences can significantly affect identity, which is constantly evolving as a result of the interaction between internal energies and external forces. Consequently, “traumatic events can be incorporated into one’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/572/image/coversmallThe Haunting Past: Exploring Jude’s Trauma and Stigma in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life2025-07-26text/htmlen-USThe Haunting Past: Exploring Jude’s Trauma and Stigma in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life2025-07-262025TWOProject MUSE®762592026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-07-26“Raised Under Glass”: Trauma, Gaze, and the City in Aminatta Forna’s Happiness (2018)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966711
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In his sonnet, William Wordsworth paints an enticing image of London in the early hours of the morning: bright, open, serene, and, above all, calm. Devoid of people or movement, the only motion comes from the river. In the absence of the city’s human population, both the river, gliding “at his own sweet will,” and the city, “that mighty heart,” become alive— active presences that bridge, however fleetingly, the divide between the urban and natural world that lies at the heart of the poem’s imagery. In Catherine Rigby’s reading of the poem, “Wordsworth’s gracious London of the sonnet” imagines what the city could become:A true dwelling place, nonetheless: a place that remains open to the earth and sky, where the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/572/image/coversmall“Raised Under Glass”: Trauma, Gaze, and the City in Aminatta Forna’s Happiness (2018)2025-07-26text/htmlen-US“Raised Under Glass”: Trauma, Gaze, and the City in Aminatta Forna’s Happiness (2018)2025-07-262025TWOProject MUSE®647002026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-07-26Symphony in White: The Attribution of Guilt
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966712
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Symphony in White is a lyrically aggressive novel written by Adriana Lisboa in 2001.1 Described as fiction prose against Brazilian neonaturalism, the book’s transgressiveness and socially engaging style allows for an array of possibilities of analysis. Set against the backdrop of rural Brazil, the novel revolves around a family and the secrets that two sisters carry from their childhood. Through her prose, Lisboa explores how trauma weaves through generations, emphasizing the silence surrounding painful memories and the weight they impose on those who carry them. Clarice and Maria Inês are two sisters burdened by secrets and traumas linked by family abuse and societal silence. The sisters’ lives are marked by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/572/image/coversmallSymphony in White: The Attribution of Guilt2025-07-26text/htmlen-USSymphony in White: The Attribution of Guilt2025-07-262025TWOProject MUSE®672032026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-07-26“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “One of the Missing”: Ambrose Bierce’s Anticipation of Psychological Trauma
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966713
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Nineteenth-century American writer Ambrose Bierce was a significant avant-garde figure in the understanding and expression of the traumatized mind. Both a civil war soldier and a writer, Bierce was in an excellent position to write about what he preemptively recognized as psychological trauma, despite the fact that psychological trauma was not yet scientifically recognized. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”1 (1890) and “One of the Missing”2 (1888), show his advanced understanding of psychological trauma through the experiences of American Civil War soldiers. Peyton Farquhar, the central character of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” undergoes a dissociative episode in the wake of the traumatizing event of his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-17T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/572/image/coversmall“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “One of the Missing”: Ambrose Bierce’s Anticipation of Psychological Trauma2025-07-26text/htmlen-US“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “One of the Missing”: Ambrose Bierce’s Anticipation of Psychological Trauma2025-07-262025TWOProject MUSE®858482026-05-17T00:00:00-05:002025-07-26