Topography of Trauma: Fissures, Disruptions and Transfigurations

Danielle Schaub, Ph.D. (1994), Associate Professor at Oranim Academic College of Education, Israel, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada, has published a monograph, several essay collections and articles, including What Happened? Re-Presenting Traumas, Uncovering Recoveries (Brill, 2018). Jacqueline Linder, Ph.D. (2014), Director of the Counselling Master Program at the Canadian campus in Edmonton of the City University of Seattle, has published multiple articles on psychological trauma and psychospiritual injury, including ‘Exploring Soul Loss Through Arts-Based Research’ (2015). Kori D. Novak, Ph.D. (2013), specialises in degenerative neuro-cognitive disease, end-of-life care and aging in the U.S. corrections system. She was a post-doctoral fellow in palliative and end-of-life care at the Stanford School of Medicine, is a Researcher with the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and a visiting scholar at Suffolk University (England). Stephanie Y. Tam is an independent researcher, writer, and producer. She completed an MSc in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and MSt in World Literatures at the University of Oxford as a Daniel M. Sachs Scholar. Her research interests include trauma theory, narrative therapy, postcolonial and migration studies, and the role of fantasy in memory, which she also explores in her creative work. Claudio Vascia Zanini, Ph.D. (2011), is Professor of Literatures in English at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and founding member of the research group Estudos do Gótico (CNPq). His research interests include Gothic studies, horror cinema and the interfaces between fiction and psychoanalysis. Besides articles, book chapters, and other co-edited volumes, he is the author of The Orgy is Over: Phantasies, Fake Realities and the Loss of Boundaries in Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted (2013).

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors



Introduction – Mapping the Topography of Trauma

 Danielle Schaub



Part 1

Conceptualising Trauma

1 The Continuum of Trauma

 Francesca Brencio and Kori D. Novak

2 Encountering Trauma ‘Too Soon’ and ‘Too Late’: Caruth, Laplanche, and the Freudian Nachträglichkeit

 Cassie Pedersen

3 ‘A World of Death and Phantoms’: Auschwitz, Androids, and the Ethical Demands of Reading Trauma and the Fantastic in Willing Unbelief

 Tony M. Vinci

4 Through the Looking-Glass: Child Sexual Abuse from the Inside-Out

 Jacqueline Linder

5 Working with Addiction and Trauma: Mental Health Professionals Reflect on Their Use of Spirituality

 Peter Bray



Part 2

Contemplating Trauma

6 Transformative Shocks: War Trauma in David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones and Sam Shepard’s States of Shock

 Asli Tekinay

7 ‘Pinned limb to limb by a ton of rocks’: Annihilation in the Face of Captivity and Torture in Alan Cumyn’s Man of Bone

 Danielle Schaub

8 Writing Trauma, Writing Modern: Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil and Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone

 Gen’ichiro Itakura

9 Body and Trauma in Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted

 Claudio Vescia Zanini

10 ‘I Used To Be Human Once’: Trauma and Reconfigurations of the Body in Chemical Disasters

 Elwin Susan John

11 Painting over the Past: Political Palimpsests in Northern Ireland and the Complexities of the ‘Whitewash’ Initiative

 Mark Callaghan

12 Transcending Genre: Narrative Strategies for Creating Literary Crime Fiction as a Subset of Trauma Literature

 Leanne Dodd



Part 3

Engaging Trauma

13 Illness Is a Window: Reframing Leukaemia through Dharma Art

 Nicholas Quin Serenati

14 Engaging Trauma Resulting from Sexual Violence through Autoethnography and Photovoice

 M. Candace Christensen

15 Creating and Contextualising Trauma-Related Contemporary Choreography

 Marie France Forcier

16 Eating Disorders: Traumatic Context and Interventions

 Diedra L. Clay



Index of Names

Indexes of Terms