This roundtable brings together five leading scholars in literature and memory studies to consider the ways in which their own scholarship has emerged from, engaged in, and evolved with these fields of enquiry. We explore the potential possibilities and problems with consolidating a new discipline of literary memory studies, and foreground the importance of developing dynamic interdisciplinary approaches to cultural and critical practices in literature and memory.

Trauma concepts have played a decisive role in the development of memory studies. The concepts provide excellent opportunities to acknowledge the ethical and political relevance of violent events of the 20^th and 21^st century because they allow memory studies experts to explore memories of violence from psychological, historical, literary, and media studies perspectives. How is the relationship between history and memory conceptualized in the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies, and what are the ethical and empirical limits of different trauma concepts?

This chapter explores the problem of society’s environmental memory loss and the potential for literary and other artistic works to counteract it. The psychologist Peter Kahn has coined the term “environmental generational amnesia” to refer to the idea that each generation’s perception of what is “normal” in nature is shaped by their own experience rather than an objective standard. As a result, Kahn notes, we forget what we have lost and do not realize the full extent of environmental degradation that has occurred over time. This phenomenon is closely related to the notion of “shifting baseline syndrome,” introduced by the marine biologist Daniel Pauly, which describes how people’s baseline expectations of the state of the environment are constantly being reset to a lower level as they are born into a world with fewer resources and a more degraded environment than the generation before. Drawing on the work of Ann Rigney and the political theorist Mihaela Mihai, I argue that creative works can play a vital role in reversing these trends and curing our planetary amnesia.

This essay discusses a graduate course at Ghent University on the literary imagination of the climate crisis that pays particular attention to the ways in which creative writers address inequalities in the global distribution of responsibility for and vulnerability to climate change in their work. A selection of recent humanities scholarship theorizing climate change and its cultural framings and impacts provides a background for the analysis of a wide range of literary responses across different genres, from novels and short stories to graphic novels, poems, and plays. The essay focuses specifically on how questions of climate justice continually guide and inform classroom discussions, shedding light not only on texts that explicitly engage with such concerns but also, and perhaps especially, on texts that largely evade them.

The Anthropocene, the new geological epoch defined by the transformative impact of human activity on the planet, has seen a dramatic increase in the pace, scope, and severity of various kinds of environmental degradation, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. Moreover, according to a plethora of bleak scientific reports, these trends show little sign of abating, boding ill for the future of humanity and life on Earth in general. The experience and anticipation of environmental loss — whether of plant and animal species, ecosystems, landscapes, or an inhabitable planet — cause profound sorrow, which is being felt more and more acutely by a growing portion of the world’s population as we move ever deeper into the Anthropocene. However, as yet, we are somewhat at a loss as to how to adequately navigate the affective terrain of environmental breakdown. Lacking standard protocols and procedures, we do not quite know how to make sense of, channel, or cope with its psychological impact.

This essay will explore how literature, and art more generally, serves as a cultural laboratory for articulating and dealing with grief related to environmental loss, which remains largely unspoken and unrecognized. The act of naming the often disenfranchised and marginalized forms of grief arising from environmental loss is a major step in bringing them to public awareness and granting them social acceptance and legitimacy so that they can be processed more effectively. Coming to terms with ecological grief can inspire efforts to work through it and reinvigorate practices of environmental advocacy in the face of the daunting ecological challenges confronting global society in the twenty-first century.

The essay consists of three parts. First, I will explain why the very idea of ecological mourning meets with strong resistance in some quarters. I will go on to discuss the phenomenon of glacier funerals, which has helped ecological mourning overcome that resistance and go mainstream in recent years. I will end by discussing a newly published novella that offers a profound meditation on its perils, pitfalls, and possibilities: The Impossible Resurrection of Grief by Octavia Cade.

The increasing visibility of climate change and scientists’ alarming warnings about it are taking a toll on people’s mental well-being. This essay surveys the culturally resonant repertoire of new coinages that have emerged in recent years to name and communicate environmentally induced distress. It pays particular attention to the concept of pre-traumatic stress disorder, which has become the focus of a small but important body of humanistic scholarschip calling for an expanded trauma theory that would be future- as well as past-oriented. Noting trauma theory’s persistent human-centredness, the essay goes on to consider attempts that are being made to reconceptualize trauma in non-anthropocentric terms and to acknowledge the interconnectedness and entanglement of human and non-human traumas. It ends by predicting that cultural trauma research, which has so far shown relatively little interest in environmental issues in general and climate change in particular, will engage more fully with our dire environmental predicament in the years ahead.

This essay gives an overview of the central themes and formal features of Jeff Nichols’s cli-fi film Take Shelter (2011). It also provides insight into the film’s reception and contribution to public debate, as well as offering some teaching ideas.

That an empathic response to testimonies can lead to altruism is a key assumption of much cultural research on trauma and witnessing, which prides itself on its ethical commitment. Most trauma theorists also agree that empathy is to be distinguished from forms of affective involvement that do not recognize and respect the otherness of the other, and which are variously referred to as sympathy, projective identification, incorporation, or crude empathy. While this caveat against imperialism and appropriation is meant to prevent empathy from turning into a closed-loop process, canonical trauma theory itself has been plagued by Eurocentrism from its inception, as it tends not to adequately address the sufferings of members of non-Western or minority groups. In this essay, I will discuss the challenges that transcultural witnessing poses for empathic understanding and ethical thinking, using both theoretical and literary texts as examples, and focusing specifically on Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What. Published by McSweeney’s in 2006, What Is the What, subtitled The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, is a collaborative first-person testimony that tells the story of a refugee from the second Sudanese civil war. I argue that in this book Eggers manages both to stay true to the continuing cultural demand for empathy with distant others and to defuse or counter the prevailing scepticism about the morality of empathic identification that tends to find such efforts hopelessly wanting. What Is the What does not resolve all the moral ambiguities surrounding transcultural witnessing, but it is unafraid to confront them and refuses to be paralysed by them. The novel harnesses feeling in the face of suffering while continually reminding the reader that Deng’s experiences are not his or hers to inhabit. Rather than solidifying an already existing community, it calls a community of otherwise distant and disconnected people into being for the purposes of alleviating suffering.

This introductory essay situates the four sections of the book in ongoing discussions on the methods, ethics, and politics of memory studies. Starting from the observation that memory is increasingly being studied as a dynamic process rather than a static product, it identifies the four main dimensions of mnemonic mobility in a globalized and digitalized world: transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and transdisciplinary. Underlining that these four dimensions cannot be studied in isolation from each other, it contends that attention to the interrelations between them is indispensable for the study of memory today. The essay shows how all twelve chapters in the book contribute to the project of capturing the dynamics of memory.   

This chapter explores the role of Holocaust memory in Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children, a short play written in response to Israel’s 2008-2009 attack on Gaza. Controversially, the play invokes the memory of the Nazi genocide of the European Jews to criticize Israeli violence against the Palestinians. To accuse Seven Jewish Children of anti-Semitism for allegedly equating Jews with Nazis, though, is to ignore the play’s complexity, multivocality, and indeterminacy. Seven Jewish Children does not deny the narrative of Jewish victimization but undermines the assumption that Jews have a monopoly on victimhood. The memory of Jewish suffering is mobilized in the service of a politics that seeks to diminish suffering universally.

This chapter discusses attempts to theorize the interrelatedness of the Holocaust and other histories of victimization against the background of, firstly, the recent broadening of the focus of the field of memory studies from the national to the transnational level, and, secondly, efforts to bridge a disciplinary divide between Jewish and postcolonial studies preventing the Holocaust and histories of slavery and colonial domination from being considered in a common frame. In so doing, it highlights the pitfalls as well as the possibilities of bringing different atrocities into contact, a challenging and often controversial endeavour that holds both perils and promises. Next, it explores the ways in which the Native American writer Sherman Alexie negotiates various comparative perspectives on the Holocaust in “The Game between the Jews and the Indians Is Tied Going into the Bottom of the Ninth Inning” (1993), a sonnet-length poem that considers Jews and Native Americans as similarly oppressed ethnic minorities, and “Inside Dachau” (1996), a long, meditative poem that describes a Native American’s reflections on visiting the site of a former Nazi concentration camp.

Despite a stated commitment to cross-cultural solidarity, trauma theory – an area of cultural investigation that emerged out of the “ethical turn” affecting the humanities in the 1990s – is marked by a Eurocentric, monocultural bias. In this chapter, I take issue with the tendency of the founding texts of the field to marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority groups, to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity, and to favour or even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma. I contend that the suffering engendered by colonialism and its aftermath needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, and in its own terms if trauma theory is to redeem its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. I illustrate this argument – developed at greater length in my book Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) – with a case study of a literary text that seems to me to call for a more inclusive, materialist, and politicized form of trauma theory. Published in 2010 to great critical acclaim, Aminatta Forna’s novel The Memory of Love examines how survivors of the Sierra Leone Civil War cope with the physical and psychological scars of those years. One of its protagonists is a British psychologist specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder who is volunteering with the stretched mental health services in Freetown in 2001, and who brings familiar Western ideas to the problems of the local population that he has been parachuted in to help solve. The novel is marked by a profound ambivalence about the applicability and viability of Western treatment methods in post-Civil War Sierra Leone. While there is a measure of closure for some characters, The Memory of Love – a fine example of literary realism – also awakens its readers to the chronic, ongoing suffering endured in silence by whole swathes of the population, in the face of which narrative therapy is an inadequate response. Thus, Forna’s novel can be seen to pose a challenge to trauma theory to remove its Eurocentric blinkers – a challenge, I argue, that the field would be well advised to embrace.

This essay offers a critical reading of Graham Swift’s Ever After which reveals the text to be engaged in a struggle to articulate a non-foundational, post-humanist ethics. Taking as its point of departure the novel’s intense preoccupation with the problematic of melancholia and mourning, it traces a movement from denial to acknowledgement of loss as a constitutive dimension of the human condition. It shows how the novel’s melancholic narrator-protagonist is forced to confront the impossibility of capturing “the real thing,” the self-completing object which, throughout his life, he has attempted to lay hold of through the redemptive ideologies of Literature, Romantic Love and History. Abandoning the principle of self-sameness for that of substitution, the narrator is seen tentatively to engage in a process of genuine mourning which may produce ethically desirable results: by the end of the novel, his sinister solipsistic fantasies appear to have given way to a readiness to enter into non-totalizing relations with other people.

Orlando has often been regarded as little more than a playful interlude in Virginia Woolf’s oeuvre, and has suffered considerable critical neglect as a result. The responsibility for the dismissive mode adopted by many critics partly lies with Woolf herself, who disparagingly described the novel as “a joke”, “farce”, “a writer’s holiday”, “an escapade” (qtd. in Minow-Pinkney 1987: 117). When Orlando is not simply omitted from critical discussion altogether, it tends to be read as a fictionalised biography of Woolf’s friend and lover Vita Sackville-West. Matching the novel’s characters and events with their counterparts in the real world becomes the sole objective of critical inquiry. What this type of response hides from view, however, are the very serious, non-biographical concerns motivating the text’s apparently frivolous play. These issues have only come to be appreciated in the last few years, which have seen a marked increase in scholarly work on the novel. Taking my cue from some of these writings, I argue that Orlando, far from being an insignificant jeu d’esprit, is in fact a radical text, whose subversion of deep-seated and taken-for-granted assumptions about gendered behaviour is suppressed by its reduction to an escapade or a mere tribute to Vita Sackville-West.