This article illustrates a relatively less charted form of exilic dislocation which I have dubbed paraexile. Unlike Claudio Guillén, who claims that exiled writers can triumph over their native attachments and create a literature of “counter-exile”, I propose, alongside critics like Lamming, Rushdie, or Said, that the trauma of displacement can never be entirely left behind and is constantly part of exilic writing. In addition, I make the claim that paraexilic literature is a peculiar form of internalizing...   ⇨ Read more

The main issue of the novel The Bonfire (Original title: Máglya) by the Hungarian writer György Dragomán is the confrontation of the child narrator (a 13-year old girl) with the traumas of the twentieth century which marked her parents’ and grandparents’ life and are still influencing her life in the post-communist era. The first premise of the central argument is that the child’s special point of view determines the perception of history and forgiveness. The second premise is that this point of view can be...   ⇨ Read more

Although trauma and memory have been a focus of cultural studies for more than twenty years now, few scholarly works focus on medium-specific representations of trauma and even fewer comment on the tendency of trauma representations to be autobiographical in the twenty-first century. Since it was established as a genre in the 1960s, the autobiographical documentary has flourished due to the increased accessibility to recording equipment offered by technological advancement. The present paper will analyse two...   ⇨ Read more

The purpose of this paper is to explore Maya Angelou’s depiction of trauma in her autobiographical fiction as a marginalized female experience which shapes the identity of the subject and speaks about the psychological integrity of the Black female. Memory functions as the process of psychological healing through the narrative reformulation of her life during childhood and adulthood. Angelou has deliberately expanded the conventional structure of the autobiographical genre by the fragmentary approach and the...   ⇨ Read more