ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship of trauma to literature and literary texts. There is something inherent to literary language that makes it particularly effective for representing the experience of trauma in ways that ordinary language cannot. The opposite is also true, that the nature of trauma offers insights for exploring questions of signification and representation that have long dogged literary studies. The claim for literature is that it shares a language with trauma that other discourses do not and that it manifests a unique capacity for what we might term traumatomimesis. This chapter argues that while we must resist overly grand claims for the traumatomimetic capacity of literary language, the moral imagination that is engaged through literary language offers great potential for understanding, representing, and healing the harms of trauma.
