Moderna | 2025 | N. 1-2

The essay explores the relationship between Trauma Studies and Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, focusing on the conceptual foundations of Freudian origin. The initial section outlines the key concepts of the first field, drawing on prominent authors and scholars in the international debate and reflecting on the intersections between two methodological horizons that are often, today, regarded as convergent or even homogenized. The second section presents Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo as a case study, with the aim of demonstrating how the two theoretical and critical orientations can and should engage in a productive dialogue – without, however, collapsing into or being reduced to one another. Finally, through a self-critical reflection on a previous work by the author, the essay advances the hypothesis of a greater foresight in the psychoanalytic critical approach when compared with traumatic hermeneutics.

This essay revisit’s Kali Tal’s early work on trauma theory and explains how the decision of ‘Yale School’ critics to adopt a psychoanalytic frame focused the field on individualized, Eurocentric models of trauma. These models, which generally ignored the systemic oppressions that create and perpetuate most human-made trauma, are ubiquitous but irrelevant. Drawing on feminist and African American theory, Tal links the individualism of psychoanalytic trauma theory to medicine’s continual cycle of expensive, often useless, and sometimes harmful ‘cures’ for ptsd, and argues that inclusive, intersectional, activist scholarship is the best method for recognizing and theorizing trauma at scale.

This article analyzes Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches (2016), originally published in French as Inyenzi ou les cafards (2006). The text portrays Mukasonga’s childhood in Rwanda, mired in post-colonial ethnic persecution, and the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. It is argued that the piece is built on different forms of intimate literature, including a historical chronicle of the genocide ; a personal chronicle of how the event marked her; a eulogy for the murdered; different forms of testimonies; confessions about survivor guilt; and a personal memoir about a traumatic past. This article also proposes that Mukasonga rewrites trauma through an existential testimony that encourages resistance; confessional writing that builds resilience; and a trauma memoir that leads to benevolent revenge.

This article examines the Eichmann trial as a turning point in Holocaust memory, where law, trauma, and media converged. Its pioneering multi-camera broadcast transformed a legal proceeding into a global spectacle, amplifying survivor testimony while inaugurating what is here called the vulgarization of evil: the conflation of justice and performance. Engaging Hannah Arendt’s critique, the essay highlights Primo Levi’s refusal to testify as poetic resistance to theatrical justice, contrasted with Natan Alterman’s embrace of the trial as national redemption. Tracing these divergent responses alongside political debates on staging justice, the article argues that the trial established lasting conditions for both the possibilities and the risks of Holocaust remembrance.

The essay examines the forms and reasons of the recurring use of photography in literary representations of trauma, both through ekphrastic strategies and phototextual practices. Traumatic pictures carry into a space that exceeds language, alluding to the unrepresentability of trauma and the never-ending process of reworking. The image- text interaction configures an epistemological friction that expresses the Nachträglichkeit of trauma. This split and deferred temporality opens to a postmemorial perspective : the visual power of photographs exposes the frailty of remembrance, but at the same time encourages the empathic activation of an affiliative memory.

Apollinaire and Ungaretti, Sassoon and Lichtenstein are some of the many European poets and writers who fought on different fronts and trenches during World War I. The selection of the four poets wants to focus on their specific treatment of wake and mourning in their war poems, in which these poets explore the power as well as the sense of impotence of poetic writing before the events of death and survival caused by war actions. Therefore, the selection of the poems will be limited to some, but significant poems, which are exemplary of the role the senses play in their attention to the trauma of war in those climactic situations such as wake (before or after the battlefield) and mourning, as a moment of consideration of the extreme stimulation the senses receive before the death of other soldiers.

The essay is focused on the representation of traumatic violence in a well-known short story by Beppe Fenoglio, Un giorno di fuoco. What is especially at stake in the story is not the violence itself, but the way the author chooses to represent it, avoiding specific and graphic details. Thus, the tension of the narrative is found elsewhere, in a series of dichotomies that shape the structure of the tale: town vs. hills; proximity vs. distance; traumatic time vs. cyclical time; male vs. female; one vs. many. This complex narrative and thematic structure keeps the reader at a distance from the core of the traumatic violence. Is this a way to diminish or amplify the impact of the traumatic violence, experienced for the first time by a child who is both attracted to and terrified by it?

«Who would take her, so old ?». The Trauma of (War) Rape and More in La Storia · Trauma – an increasingly present topic in a host of disciplines – allows productive rereading of canonical texts such as Elsa Morante’s History. In this 1974 text trauma occasioned by rape during World War ii is a decisive issue and informs the novel’s oneiric plot. While pointing out references to specific intertexts (Vae victis by Annie Vivanti and La Ciociara by Alberto Moravia), the article shows how Morante opposes traditional descriptions and conceptions of rape. Ida, a daughter of a Jewish mother, is a fear-haunted survivor of multiple trauma : violence of rape and of Jewish ancestry. It is not a home or an entire homeland that is raped, but a woman (‘biological home’), carrying long-lasting, intergenerational distress. In History, Morante also takes sides against abortion, an issue at the time fervently disputed.

«Who would take her, so old ?». The Trauma of (War) Rape and More in La Storia · Trauma – an increasingly present topic in a host of disciplines – allows productive rereading of canonical texts such as Elsa Morante’s History. In this 1974 text trauma occasioned by rape during World War ii is a decisive issue and informs the novel’s oneiric plot. While pointing out references to specific intertexts (Vae victis by Annie Vivanti and La Ciociara by Alberto Moravia), the article shows how Morante opposes traditional descriptions and conceptions of rape. Ida, a daughter of a Jewish mother, is a fear-haunted survivor of multiple trauma: violence of rape and of Jewish ancestry. It is not a home or an entire homeland that is raped, but a woman (‘biological home’), carrying long-lasting, intergenerational distress. In History, Morante also takes sides against abortion, an issue at the time fervently disputed.

The case of Italian asylums relates to the western history of total institutions and, at the same time, is unique in the world. The difference is given by Law 180 of 1978, known as ‘Basaglia Law’, which sanctioned the closure of psychiatric hospitals and legitimized the ‘psychiatric revolution’. This study fits into the panorama of Italian cultural studies and aims at analysing the way in which psychiatric history plays a pivotal role in the cultural and symbolic processes which have shaped the forms of memory and the modes of post-traumatic narration. The objective is to highlight the connection between the ‘sites of the trauma’ (Violi 2014) of internment in psychiatric hospital, the narratives of memory, and contemporary transmedia rewritings. The case study concerns Villa azzurra children’s mental hospital, which from the 1970s to today has been the subject of literary, journalistic, television, photographic and cinematographic narrations.

The subject of this essay is the thauma-trauma relationship: thauma, a concept of Platonic origin, as amazement for the horrific, as trauma, or as an experience that destabilizes the subject. And it is in the spiral of vertigo that knowledge begins. The thaumàzein on which we have focused is the vertigo caused by prison, confinement or exile, experiences that have coercive limitation in common. In this perspective, the objects of analysis have been The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De profundis by Oscar Wilde, the novels Il carcere by Cesare Pavese and L’università di Rebibbia by Goliarda Sapienza, Lettere dal carcere by Antonio Gramsci, Per abitare l’esilio by Maria Zambrano.

The essay discusses the work of the Compagnia delle Poete, a collective of non-Italian female authors who nevertheless write and perform in Italian. Through a form of theatre based on highly innovative performances, they systematically bring their migrant experiences to the stage and share their journeys of displacement, identity dispersion, and personal rebirth. Favoring a methodological approach that intersects the fields of Trauma Studies and Migration Studies, the study aims to provide a preliminary general analysis of both the revolutionary nature and poetics of such an artistic collective, as well as the aesthetic innovations that characterize it from a formal perspective.

Is historical conditioning destiny? The question is of particularly relevance in Southern Italy, where themes of fatalism and pessimism have been projected onto, and processed within, culture, literature and politics for centuries. Yet in America, where many southern peasants fled, it has been subsumed within historical amnesia. Recent research in epigenetics has revived and universalized this notion by suggesting that certain experiences, especially traumatic ones, can be inherited and passed down through time in culture and soma. The research paints a complex, uncertain picture of how historical experiences shape identity, and has occasioned debate. This paper examines how the Southern Question in Italy and the Italian American diasporic experience in Northeastern Pennsylvania underscore the need for new relational models in understanding historical conditioning. By exploring the work of Leonardo Sciascia and Ernesto De Martino, a model for reframing inherited trauma emerges, understood not as an inescapable fate, but as a kind of chronic condition, one that can be remolded through agency and memory. Their thinking presents a nuanced framework for conceiving of historical consciousness, and illuminating how the pain of the past can be processed into pathways for resilience and political renewal.

This article argues Canada’s residential schools inflicted a unique ethnocultural trauma on Coast Salish peoples by systematically erasing their historical consciousness – a key determinant of traditional social status. This assault, a facet of cultural genocide, aimed to reduce children to a devalued state, dispossessed of their cultural-historical identity. Interweaving survivor memoirs with ethnographic accounts, this study demonstrates how this loss caused profound alienation and identity crises. Recognizing this targeted destruction is essential for understanding the schools’ legacy and for authentic reconciliation.

This paper offers a critical review of trauma studies, tracing their origins to recent developments. It explores the discipline’s interdisciplinarity, drawing from fields such as psychology, literature, and sociology. The article highlights key theoretical debates, including the ‘unspeakable’ nature of trauma articulated by scholars such as Caruth versus the multidirectional views proposed by others, such as Rothberg. It also examines new directions, such as the focus on collective trauma, the influence of feminist and postcolonial perspectives and a growing linguistic approach. The article concludes by discussing how these studies have been introduced into the Italian context and their future.