Research Explorer

Project

Trauma, Testimony, and Community in Postcolonial Literature in English (J. M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, and Eavan Boland)
Code
3E000806
Duration
01 October 2007 → 30 September 2012
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund, Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • Language studies
    • Literary studies
    • Theory and methodology of language studies
    • Theory and methodology of linguistics
    • Theory and methodology of literary studies
    • Other languages and literary studies
Keywords
J. M. Coetzee postcolonial studies Eavan Boland Eurocentrism Caryl Phillips trauma theory
 
Project description
 

This research project examines how trauma theory can break with Eurocentrism and thus realize its self-declared ethical potential. It consists of a theoretical part in which the possibility and point of “postcolonializing” trauma theory are investigated, and a practical part made up of three case studies of postcolonial literary oeuvres that bear witness to the suffering engendered by colonial oppression.