Thursday seminar: Stories of Rape Trauma

Stories of Rape Trauma: Narratological and Psychotraumatological Perspectives
Daniela Lillhannus, PhD Fellow in Comparative Literature, Department of Literature, Uppsala University

During the past three decades there has been an upsurge of American and Nordic novels taking on the subject of rape trauma. While this category of fiction tends to narrate traumatic events as memories which haunt the protagonist, remarkably often the traumatized victim of rape is herself depicted as ghostlike. Drawing on the second chapter of my doctoral thesis, this talk will discuss the function of ghosts and spectral elements in contemporary Nordic and North American novels about rape trauma. I argue that by employing unnatural narrative strategies such as dead or ghostly narrators, fictional stories can explore central aspects of trauma such as loss of power and social disconnection.