ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that recognizing a limited global participation as a contemporary structure of experience and relation opens important analytical perspectives also to literary works that engage with traumatic histories and their mediation on a transnational scale. It analysis of the emphasis on mediation in contemporary literatures of trauma is indebted to discussions in transcultural memory studies on cultural memory as a multidirectional process, in which individuals and collectives may invest locally specific meanings into memorial forms that circulate transnationally. The concern with transnational mediation in contemporary literature may be contextualized to a more general shift in cultural discourses towards an awareness of a more global public sphere. Like Cole’s Open City, Alexander Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project addresses the difficulty of mediating narratives of historical trauma across different frames of experience and narrative in the contemporary world.
