A (Dis)Play of Traces: Trauma, Witnessing, and the Poetics of Implication

This thesis will provide a comparative analysis of the poetics of traumatic hindsight and the literary devices that three texts---Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces, Linda Hogan's Solar Storms, and Toni Morrison's Beloved---utilize to signify the necessity of a retrospective gaze towards the atrocious past. The thesis investigates the ways in which each text negotiates the fragmentation that characterizes the traumatic aftermath, particularly as a result of the incomplete nature of traumatic history inscribed as absence of knowledge. It also explores the positioning of such a past within an intersubjective context, which goes beyond the simple individual plight to comprehend the need to be an ethically responsible agent of remembrance in the present. A central aspect of this study is thus the focus on how memory and witnessing are deeply entwined with the linguistic, which, by imploding into the poetic, offers the possibility of reconciling the imaginative intervention with the (obliquely) referential.;Keywords: trauma; return; witnessing; poetics; transmission; language; memory; ethics.