With the tragic events of the 20th century investigation of trauma as a psychic phenomenon has acquired paramount importance. It isan interdisciplinary subject involving doctors, psychologists, philosophers, writers. The Lost Generation authors and modernists were the first to address the problem of emotional shocks experienced by their heroes during WWI. Since then trauma, its causes and consequences have been one of the essential thematic components of world literature and, consequently, trauma studies have become an object of scholarly interest in the last decades of the 20th century in various humanitarian spheres. The present article addresses the way the contemporary Belarusian writer Lyudmila Rublewaskaya represents traumatized consciousness in her novel “The Daguerrotype” (2014). The novel draws its title from an old daguerreotype described in it. It was found by two contemporary young people together with a diary recounting the events of the late 19thcentury. The novel consists of two parts called “The Book of the Inner Circle” and “The Book of the Outer Circle” which are set in two interrelated time planes –the late 19th century and our time respectively. Through the intricately interwoven life stories of five personages the writer looks into various kinds of trauma, exposes their reasons, traces their consequences and describes her heroes’ ways of overcoming the mental distress. The traumatic experience of the characters was either due to the socio-political atmosphere in Russia in the late 19th century, or to a combination of a tragic accident, superstition and manipulation, or to a clash of rough force and nobleness. The significance of unveiling a person’s secret through narration for overcoming the traumatic psychic aftermath is illustrated in the novel, too.
Like many other world literatures, the English literature of the last few decades has been marked by an intensive search for new narrative techniques, for innovative ways and means of arranging a plot and portraying characters. The search has resulted, among other things, into merging literature with visual arts like painting, film and photography. This phenomenon got the name of ekphrasis and has become a popular field of literary research lately.Suffice it to cast a glance at several of the novels published around the year 2000 to see that incorporation of photographic images into fiction allows writers to use new means of organizing literary texts, to employ nonconventional devices of structuring a plot and delineating personages as well as to pose various problems of aesthetic, ethical, ideological nature.We suggest to look briefly at seven novels published in the last three decades to see the various roles assigned to photography by their authors: Out of this World (1988) by Graham Swift, Ulverton (1992) by Adam Thorpe, Master Georgie
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