ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a number of developments in the field of trauma theory, which has grown significantly since the early 1990s. The notion that traumatic experiences can only be adequately represented through the use of experimental, modernist textual strategies, which can be traced back to Theodor Adorno’s pronouncements about poetry after Auschwitz, had become received wisdom in trauma theory by the 2000s. Literary and cultural studies have been lagging behind disciplines such as history, psychology, and philosophy, which have tended to show less reluctance to engage with the perpetrator’s perspective. The chapter discusses the emerging tendency to study trauma as a global rather than a European or Western phenomenon. It looks at the shift or broadening of focus from victim trauma to perpetrator trauma: the tendency to no longer limit one’s inquiry to the experiences of victims but to also take on board those of perpetrators as well as other categories of people implicated in traumatic events or histories.
