Trauma and life-writing

Life-writing constitutes an important space of interrogation of a range of questions about the possibilities and limits of mediating traumatic experience that, via complex engagements with different historical and sociocultural contexts, ideologies and discourses has served a number of different purposes. Critical engagements with different modes and formats of life-writing with the dominating paradigm of trauma vary from proceeding broadly within its framework to problematizing its underlying assumptions from various vantage points. Critical considerations of autobiographical representation of traumatic experience have predominantly focused on its effects and ways of coping from the perspective of the victim, either within individual or collective or historical frameworks. The imperative of representing traumatic experience has tested the generic limits of life-writing, leading to the creation of new modes and practices of self-representational writing that have contributed both to the expansion of the generic parameters of life-writing and the perception of the role of life-writing in culture in general.