Introduction

This book presents a series of texts representative of various countries, as if timeliness were fairly well distributed in various cultural areas. It solicits various critical and methodological approaches: ethics, trauma studies, vulnerability studies, and biopolitics, among others. The book approaches character construction or definition in relation to the voiding of the ailing subject, who is paradoxically filled in by the hole of trauma. It addresses questions relating to the effects of the wound in the formation, relocation or displacement of identity. Working from the wound and from the scar may well provide the double-headed premise on which the fiction that the book seeks to explore is built. The wound radically figures out an openness and a dependence that is shared by all protagonists. The book addresses novels concerned with the presentation of subjects who are capable despite their fallibility to strive for wholeness, thereby being guaranteed a state of incompleteness.