Literary Agency in the Wake of Catastrophe. The Canonization of the Literary Responses to Trauma

Textual agency plays a fundamental role with regard to the literary production devoted to catastrophic events and the trauma they entail; it raises questions about the ethics of the disaster, as if to say the legitimacy of the literary works on the theme. The authorial commitment to bear witness to the events often clashes with the unrepresentability of the event itself: silence and discursivity are both misleading choices in the sense that the first is a real blot on History, while the latter implies to domesticate trauma in order to transpose it into literary forms. This article aims to give relevance to the therapeutic agency of the Literature of the catastrophe and in doing so, it contributes to the re-evaluation of the genre as part of the literary canon.

Textual agency plays a fundamental role with regard to the literary production devoted to catastrophic events and the trauma they entail; it raises questions about the ethics of the disaster, as if to say the legitimacy of the literary works on the theme. The authorial commitment to bear witness to the events ofen clashes with the unrepresentability of the event itself: silence and discursivity are both misleading choices in the sense that the first is a real blot on History, while the latter implies to domesticate trauma in order to transpose it into literary forms. This article aims to give relevance to the therapeutic agency of the Literature of the catastrophe and in doing so, it contributes to the re-evaluation of the genre as part of the literary canon.