Fiction, Postmemory and Transgenerational Trauma: Literary Possibilities through the Shoah Paradigm

Abstract

In this article, I place literature as a possibility for the working-through of trauma, taking as object the paradigmatic case of the Shoah, an event that established the need to think about new ways of dealing with the past in historiography. With the inclusion of testimony as a source for historiography, memory invades the historiographical space. Concepts such as post-memory and the notion of a transgenerationality of trauma will be mobilized in order to address the fiction produced by survivors that were children at the time and members of a second and third generation after the Shoah. The text is divided into two major topics, the first dedicated to the so-called 1.5 generation and the second dedicated to the second and third generations.