Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale
Monographic journal issue | 54 | Supplemento | 2018
Research Article | Literary Agency in the Wake of Catastrophe
Literary Agency in the Wake of Catastrophe
The Canonization of the Literary Responses to Trauma
Abstract
Textual agency plays a fundamental role with regard to the literary production devoted to catastrophic events and the trauma they entail; it raises questions about the ethics of the disaster, as if to say the legitimacy of the literary works on the theme. The authorial commitment to bear witness to the events often clashes with the unrepresentability of the event itself: silence and discursivity are both misleading choices in the sense that the first is a real blot on History, while the latter implies to domesticate trauma in order to transpose it into literary forms. This article aims to give relevance to the therapeutic agency of the Literature of the catastrophe and in doing so, it contributes to the re-evaluation of the genre as part of the literary canon.
Submitted: July 11, 2018 | Accepted: Oct. 9, 2018 | Published Dec. 6, 2018 | Language: en
Keywords Trauma • Literature • Catastrophe • Fukushima • Canon
Copyright © 2018 Veronica De Pieri. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2018/01/029
