'No longer haunted'?: Cultural trauma and traumatic realism in the novels of Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison

Based on the conviction that literary trauma theory, currently predominated by a focus on holocaust narratives and binary categorization of traumas, could benefit from the insights provided by Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison's representations of the traumas caused by Manifest Destiny and slavery, respectively, and informed by an understanding of fiction's capacity to recover history and produce theory, this study investigates the works of Erdrich and Morrison to broaden current conceptions of trauma and better understand its literary representation. Analysis of Erdrich and Morrison's narratives of cultural trauma reveals the complex intersections between communal trauma and personal trauma as well as historical trauma and transhistorical trauma, the cyclical nature of collective trauma, and evidence that the continuing consequences of colonization like chronic poverty, cultural dislocation and racism are forms of trauma. The techniques Erdrich and Morrison employ to create their uniquely vivid depictions of trauma include their complementary incorporation of magic and unconventional novelistic form working synergistically to create traumatic realism. Through a combination of emphasis on the survivors' amazing resilience in spite of the severe traumas they have endured and endings that conspicuously resist narrative closure by invoking multiple competing interpretations, Erdrich and Morrison offer hope while still honoring the gravity of the traumas they explore. While they do not portray healing for their characters as a simple or completed project, they do gesture towards a future when at least they might be "no longer haunted."...