Introduction: Reading Trauma in the Twenty-First Century

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores academic work on trauma and life narrative now, with a view to seeding debate as well as surveying the field. The Greek root of trauma is 'wound', and the experience of trauma is an overwhelming and self-shattering event that is frequently theorised as unspeakable, resistant to representation. In her genealogical approach to the study of trauma, Ruth Leys situates the most recent turn to trauma studies across a range of disciplines and in relation to the waxing and waning of interest in trauma over the course of more than a century. The book also introduces some new media, contexts and methodologies in seeing, hearing and reading trauma narrative in youth cultures. It explores the traumatic story that has in no small part been established through Peter Read's insistence on the power of testimony and witnessing the Stolen Generations.