This is a study of three contemporary Colombian novels using combat trauma theory as an interpretive model. Following the method of psychological literary criticism that psychiatrist Jonathan Shay used in his books Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002) to analyze the characters Achilles and Odysseus, I propose to analyze characters in Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios ‘Our Lady of the Assassins’ (1994), Darío Jaramillo Agudelo’s Cartas cruzadas ‘Crossed Letters’ (1995), and Juan Gabriel Vásquez El ruido de las cosas al caer ‘The Sound of Things Falling’ (2011) to extend Shay's theories of combat trauma to a broad cultural context. While Colombia has not been engaged in a conventional, state-to-state war, it has been at a constant level of large-scale internal violence for over fifty years, perpetrated by a complex mix of paramilitaries, guerillas, narcotraffickers, and state-sponsored organizations: Colombia has consistently ranked among the top countries in the world for rates of homicide and displaced peoples. Shay’s model allows me to argue this kind of radically epistemologically and phenomenologically destabilizing environment in which non-combatants as well as combatants live under the constant threat of violence as producing severe psychological trauma. These texts have an additional cultural-psychological function. Shay identifies as an effective coping strategy the victims' act of integrating the traumatic memory into a coherent narrative, in order to both regain authority over their consciousness and to give social testimony to the injustice of the traumatic event. I will show how the characters in the texts I analyze make themselves psychologically whole in direct relation to the success with which they can narrate the story of their own trauma: those who fail do so in large part because the discourses available to them are inadequate to articulate the profundity of the trauma; those who succeed do so because they have found a form and structure that allows them to construct a coherent narrative of Self that incorporates the traumatic memory of the nation's failure.

Foreign Bodies: Military Medicine, Modernism and Melodrama traces how representations of warfare in the modernist novel, girls' romances, nursing memoirs, and war films dramatize the humanitarian disaster of war through the figure of woman. My analysis focuses on the visual and literary poetics of violence as troped in and through the bodies of combat nurses. The "uncanny" serves as a lens to explore the complex links between gendered war work and the radical transgression of the boundaries of the nation state and the body experienced during wartime. To establish the unique explanatory power of the uncanny for gender issues, I trace how feminist and postcolonial theorists have revised Freud's analysis of the uncanny. I trace medical metaphors of wounding and infection in the novel and various cinematic adaptations of A Farewell to Arms (1932, 1951, 1957, 1996). I read the letters and diaries of World War I nurse Agnes von Kurowsky against the censored memoirs of American nurses Mary Borden and Ellen La Motte. I show how the uncanny aesthetic adopted by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms is subverted by these women writers. I explore how these uncanny aesthetics also manifest in adolescent nursing romances from Sue Barton to Cherry Ames. With the onset of World War II, I trace how the discourse of foreign bodies in relation to the metaphor of malaria in the South Pacific. Focusing on the portrayal of the Japanese foreign body, often encoded through off-screen sound, I demonstrate how medical metaphors of malaria operate in films portraying nursing in the South Pacific such as So Proudly We Hail (1943) and Cry Havoc (1943). Turning to the Korean and Vietnam Wars, I explore the representation of post-traumatic stress disorder in M*A*S*H (1970) and in nursing memoirs such as American Daughter Gone to War (1992) and Home Before Morning (1983). I bring this history of nursing representation to bear on media texts concerning the war in Iraq including Baghdad E.R. (HBO, 2006).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Johns Hopkins University, 1899. / Life.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Johns Hopkins University, 1899. / Life.

This thesis is an historical and literary investigation of the treatment of the 1979- 89 Soviet-Afghan War in contemporary Russian literature. The texts chosen for study include official and unofficial literature, written within the former USSR as well as abroad, and cover publicistic writing, poetry, and prose fiction. These works are described and analyzed with a two-fold purpose: to explore creative trends found in the literature of this subject, and to evaluate the extent to which the genre of Afghan War literature in Russian has changed over the past decade. In order to provide a context for this literature, the introduction describes the method of socialist realism as it applies to military themes, and the legacy of World War Two novels in Russian. The first chapter provides a brief history of Russian-Afghan relations, and an account of the ten-year intervention. The second chapter documents the dissolution of official censorship during the 1980s, revealing dissent over the Soviet military role in Afghanistan. Chapter Three discusses the evolution of the genre of publicistic writing, and documents its unprecedented frankness through revelations made in Soviet journalistic investigations. Chapter Four provides an overview of song and poetry about the conflict, beginning with magnitizdat produced by amateur songwriters, and later including works by professional poets. Chapter Five discusses novels and short stories about the war. A range of fictional works is traced, from propagandistic portrayals, both pro-and anti-Soviet, to non-ideological, personal interpretations which incorporate lyricism, satire, and fantasy. Chapter Six focuses on the works of Aleksandr Prokhanov, a writer who initially used his fiction to support the war effort, and whose oeuvre charts the disintegration of Party consensus on interpretation and depiction of the events in Afghanistan. The final three chapters treat the works of Oleg Ermakov, whose lyricism and stylistic experimentation mark a new direction for recent Russian war fiction. The analysis shows Afghan War literature to signal a radical break with recent official Soviet military writing as shaped by socialist realism. This break is evident in the frankness and subjectivity of publicistic writing, and the anti-war sentiment found in a significant minority of published songs and poems. In particular, Oleg Ermakov's prose continues the past legacy of unofficial, dissident war fiction.

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation enriches the field of Comparative Literature by examining the trauma narratives of Chinese women in wartime through a cross-cultural and cross-medium lens. It focuses on their experiences as they are articulated in a variety of texts and visual media, in the process offering an exploration of the intersection between gender, trauma, and war. By incorporating theoretical frameworks from Western trauma studies into an analysis of Chinese and Asian contexts, the study further contributes to Comparative Literature by fostering an intercultural dialogue. This unique approach uncovers shared patterns of human suffering and resilience, providing new insights into the universality and particularity of trauma representation. The dissertation extends the boundaries of Comparative Literature by examining the influence of gender on the construction and reception of trauma narratives. It also gives a novel contribution by addressing broader social and political issues both in the context of China, Asia, and globally. The four chapters examine the portrayal of women’s experiences produced generations after the war, focusing on the following topics, respectively: the witness of sexual violence, the challenges of representing feminine pain, repetition of traumatic memory, and the complexity of individual and collective experiences in relation to wartime traumas. By analyzing mostly novels, as well as films and testimonies, the dissertation emphasizes the importance of considering both historical records and shared personal memories, as well as the role of artistic expression in fostering empathy and understanding. This research offers a valuable contribution by illuminating the enduring and complex impact of war on women’s lives. Furthermore, it provides a strong foundation for future studies, ultimately contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the representation of traumatic experiences of individuals and communities affected by trauma. </p>

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Une guerre civile est un conflit violent impliquant un changement socio-politique dramatique qui devient un jalon historique, culturel et littéraire. C’est une période où les processus doubles de la déconstruction et de la reconstruction reformulent les lois, l’histoire et les identités communautaires. Le fait que ces transformations rapides impliquent une souffrance humaine massive est peut-être l’aspect le plus perturbant d’une guerre civile. Cette thèse analyse la façon dont les romans contemporains sur les guerres civiles de l’Espagne et de l’ex-Yougoslavie représentent l’expérience humaine au cours de ces périodes de transformations sociales chaotiques et violentes. A partir d’une étude comparative des œuvres, elle soutient que les romans représentent la condition humaine en se focalisant sur les expériences subjectives des gens ordinaires pendant les conflits, et en reléguant en arrière-plan les évènements politiques et militaires de la guerre civile. / A civil war is a violent conflict of dramatic political and social change that becomes a historical, cultural and literary marker. It is a period when laws, history and identities are reformulated through dual processes of deconstruction and reconstruction. This makes evident the symbolic dimension of civil war violence and accentuates the unstable, precarious and malleable nature of identity constructs, ideologies and history. The fact that these rapid transformations implicate massive human suffering is perhaps what is most unsettling about civil war. A civil war is not only a pivotal moment in a nation’s history but as well on an individual level for those who live through it and have to adapt to the changing systems of values that redefine life during and after the conflict. This thesis examines how contemporary novels dealing with the Spanish Civil War and the Yugoslav conflict reflect on the human experience during these periods of chaotic and violent social transformations. The study presents a comparative analysis of the following works: Camilo José Cela’s San Camilo, 1936, Dževad Karahasan’s Sara i Serafina (Sara and Sefarina), Mercè Rodoreda’s Quanta, quanta guerra… (War, so much war), Velibor Čolić’s Chronique des oubliés (Chronicle of the forgotten), Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (The backroom), David Albahari’s Mrak (Darkness), and Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salmanina (Soldiers of Salamis). Parting from a close study of the texts, the thesis argues that the novels represent the human dimension by focusing on ordinary people’s subjective experiences during the conflict while relegating the political and military events surrounding the civil war to the background. Such representations aspire to redeem the complexities and the significance of individual lives and of a social collective, which the civil war’s physical and symbolic violence dehumanizes, silences and obliterates.

The Great War narrative has been the subject of wide scholarship but there have been no studies that have specifically focused on understanding the ethical and aesthetic struggles of the artist in war, the artist’s dilemma. The generation that experienced the Great War included many giants of twentieth-century intellectual, cultural, and political life, many of whom wrote personal narratives of their experiences. These narratives have contributed to shaping familial stories and the meta-narratives of nation states for generations—sometimes limiting a fuller understanding of the war. Through this thesis I aim to open the field of narrative investigation into a wider inquiry through applying what Brian Lande identifies as the ‘sensual and moral conversion’ of the soldier in war, to the artistic actor in the theatre of war. The proposition is to identify and read beyond generic conventions, then to observe the process, the tasks, and the moral, psychosocial, and aesthetic dilemmas of the artist in the theatre of war. To do this, the work focuses on three robust texts of the Great War: Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That (1929), Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone (1929), and David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937). The project explores not only the nuance of creative witness, self-witness, and testimony, but proposes a fuller empathic engagement with the narrative within the social contract of war writing. After developing a model of the formal conventions which structure the genre of war writing, and building on the work of Max Saunders, Henri LeFebvre, and others, I have carried out close readings of the three authors’ Great War narratives and related works. With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses literary, artistic, historical, ethical, and sociological studies, and with extensive archival research, I propose to introduce another perspective on reading between the lines of Great War narratives. This perspective encompasses the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas that faced the artists of the war generation as they acted and reacted to war, a generation that shaped the intellectual, political, scientific, and artistic life of the twentieth century, and the lives of generations to follow.

The aim of this MA thesis is to describe and evaluate the manner in which Richard Flanagan captured Japanese culture in his 2013 novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Since the main motif of the work is the life of an Australian prisoner of war, a topic that has been significant in the creation of Australian national identity, the novel is firstly analysed from its position in the wider context of Australian literature. Richard Flanagan provided the readers with a complex work, which presents the given motif not only from the perspective of the Australian prisoners-of-war, but also from the perspective of their predominantly Japanese captors. The inclusion of the points of view of the Japanese ranks the novel among the contemporary adaptations that provide a more comprehensive view on the events of World War II. For that reason, the novel is assessed as to the complexity and accuracy of the selected and incorporated areas of Japanese culture, whether there is a tendency for schematization in the depiction, and therefore a display of the so-called "Orientalism", as described by Edward Said. This MA thesis aims to analyse whether, and to what degree Flanagan's novel differs from other works of the Australian literature that deal with the events of World War II and Japan. The analysis focuses on...