“Trauma and Memory of Soviet Occupation in Slovak (Post-) Communist Literature.” In: Postcolonial Europe? Essays on Post-Communist Literatures and Cultures, ed. D. Pucherová and Róbert Gáfrik (Leiden-Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2015), ISBN 978-9-004-30384-3, pp. 139-159. (original) (raw)

Based on a discursive analysis of poetry and fiction, this chapter analyses trends in Slovak communist and (post)-communist trauma narratives within the frame of postcolonial and trauma theory. Relying on intuitions by theorists such as Mbembe and Caruth, it suggests that assumptions of narrative psychology such as structured narratives and closure may not always be applicable to (post)-communist narratives in which issues of seduction, complicity, betrayal and irrational impulses complicate the meaning of collective traumas and the ways nations come to terms with them. Postmodern approaches that blur the line between history and fiction, including the outright rejection of the possibility of recovering history, and anti-realist modes such as the absurd and meta-fiction, seem to have a refreshing, anti-ideological effect upon post-communist historiography, de-centring history to recognize the nation as essentially hybrid and ambivalent.