درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The present paper addresses Pat Barker’s Another World in the light of Cathy Caruth’s psychoanalytical notions concerning the traumatic experiences of the subjects. This analysis attempts to trace the concepts of latency, post-traumatic stress disorders, trauma of fratricide, and domestic trauma in Barker’s novel in order to explore how trauma and history are interrelated in the narrative of history and, particularly, in what manners trauma is transmittable trans-generationally. The present paper also demonstrates how Barker’s novel Another World acts as the narrative of trauma that vocalizes the silenced history of shell-shocked soldiers of World War I to affect the domestic and national arenas of British society, the history that has been concealed due to social and individual factors. The study thus investigates the dissociative disorders, which are experienced by traumatized survivors of World War I as the aftermath of traumatic experiences of wartime. In addition, it argues how time moves for the traumatized victim and how the notion of latency in terms of Caruth’s theory is traceable in Barker’s novel. In Another World, the traumatized survivor is haunted with traumatic memory of his past history, that constantly disrupts his present and the victim is in continuous shift from present time to past time. Time thus loses its linearity in the narrative of traumatized survivor.

The present paper proposes to consider eventfulness as a category for developing feminist narratology. Feminist/gender-conscious models of narrative theory have already taken into account a few narratological categories for their project including narrative closure, engaging narrator, and narrative authority. Studying the relationship between narrative eventfulness and women’s writing can be of great help for furthering the feminist narratology’s agenda. Eventfulness is a scalar feature of narrative, attributed to the degree of existence of a change of state. An event can occur in story-world, narration, or in the reader’s mind. The canonicity-breach aspect of an event, that is, the success or failure in transgressing boundaries, makes eventfulness ideologically significant. To show the applicability of gendering narrative eventfulness, Zoya Pirzad’s I Turn off the Lights is used as an illustrative example. I Turn off the Lights (Persian: Cheraq-ha ra Man Khamush Mikonam 2001; English translation: Things We Left Unsaid 2012) is a contemporary Iranian novel which has been received very well by the readers. Choosing I Turn off the Lights as an example is expected to give my appropriation of feminist narrative theory a comparative quality. By situating I Turn off the Lights in the literary context of Iran, it is argued that the reduced form of eventfulness in the novel can be read as a sign of ossified normative orders that make border crossing for the main female character (Clarisse) almost impossible.