Endemic trauma and the cross-cultural gap : a study of fiction about the 2003 American-Iraqi war

Trauma theories have acquired paradigmatic significance in the study of war and representations of violence and horrors. Theorists like Freud, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Kay Erikson and Judith Herman explore trauma through analyzing distinctions of victims-perpetrators-witnesses as well as themes of gender and female representations. War literature shares with trauma theories this interest in studying the methodology of expressing war from various perspectives, whether individualistic or collective. My project studies these aspects through intersectional narrative representations of war- trauma literature. I focus on narratives that are written by American and Iraqi writers in relation to 2003 invasion of the US on Iraq. In this study, I argue that positioning the events and the characters at an intersection between theories of psychological and cultural trauma is best in understanding cross-cultural traumatic connection resulting from war and violence. This study problematizes and recontextualizes the psychological, cultural, and cross-cultural relations of trauma in narrative. I attempt at demolishing cultural barriers through discussing analogous premises and igniting empathy in dealing with the other through reading trauma and victimhood. Each of my chapters responds to a definite problem stimulated through intercultural and transcultural connections resisting, at the same time, Eurocentric representations of the other. Gender, space, and testimony manage to destabilize significant traumatic-derived assumptions that identify common thematic foundations in characterizing the texts under discussion.Englis