The Family, Constructed Reality and Collective Traumatic Memory: Pat Barker’s Another World

Études Britanniques Contemporaines

关键词: Pat Barker;    Another World;    aphasia;    fratricide;    ghost;    infanticide;   

DOI  :  10.4000/ebc.3714

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Pat Barker’s compelling novel, Another World (1998), leads us on an uncanny voyage, with World War I in the background, but by no means simply in the past, and the problematic histories of two families—one Victorian, the other contemporary—and their crimes of fratricide and infanticide. These crimes and the traumatic memories which they foster become collective and intergenerational through the family, and in Another World human minds and bodies bear the traces of the experience and the family- based transmission of these traumatic memories, which become legible to others in the real world, through organic symptoms like aphasia and sleepwalking, or less objectively, through contact with ghosts. This very legibility, however, calls into question any objective definition of reality, a reality where the time of ‘then’ and ‘now’ and the space of ‘there’ and ‘not there’ become inextricably linked

【 授权许可】

Unknown