European Journal of American Culture - Volume 25, Issue 3, 2007

Sylvia Plath's work has been consistently situated in the realm of the personal, subsuming such related categories as the psychological, the feminine and the nature of illness. However, Plath's use of the first person pronoun is never as straightforwardly personal as we might like to believe. An important context for the nature of the Plathean I is an awareness of the nature of observation, being observed and the powers of rhetoric. I argue that this comes from the cultural context in which Plath wrote and it is the purpose of this paper to situate the Plathean I of The Bell Jar and Ariel within that context; namely, the terrifying and mad cultural phenomenon of the paranoid style of American cold war politics, in order to link cultural context to poetics.

In a 1994 interview, Tim O'Brien insists that one of the key aims of his fiction is to invite the reader to occupy the position of the author/narrator so that the reader is encouraged, as O'Brien puts it, to identify with the experience which is being narrated. O'Brien's desire to enable the presumably non-traumatized reader to occupy the position of the traumatized writer/narrator demonstrates his concern with attempting to find ways of overcoming the division between those who experienced the war in Vietnam and those who did not. In this paper I argue that O'Brien's most recent novel, July, July (2002) constitutes his most sustained investigation of this theme. O'Brien attempts to negotiate the extremes of individualisation and universalisation appealed to in writing about war, and in writing about trauma more generally by situating the trauma of Vietnam, not within the geographical confines of South East Asia, but within the specific temporal confines of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I employ theories of hysteria developed by Juliet Mitchell and theories of mourning proposed by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok to investigate how loss is experienced by the class of 69. Furthermore, I explore how, by emphasising cultural or historical, rather than the psychological, equivalence between survivors of trauma, O'Brien is able to probe the limits of trauma as it is generally defined by canonical trauma writers including Judith Herman and Kal Tal. In July, July O'Brien creates a group of literal and metaphorical amputees who have all been similarly wounded by their shared time and place in history. In doing this, O'Brien extends the relevance and applicability of the experience of trauma to those who did not participate directly in the war, while still resisting the urge to universalize or suggest that trauma is equally accessible to all subjects. O'Brien's work in this area seems timely and suggests that, in the light of recent events like America's wars in the Gulf, 9/11 and the War on Terror' which challenge the polarisation between traumatized survivor and generally non-traumatized population, new interpretations of what it means to be traumatized are required.

To understand stories, one must understand the spirit of the stories and the spirit of the person and the family who is telling them. Above all, one must know oneself. For Louise Erdrich, the American writer of Mtis/Cree/Chippewa (also known as Anishinabe or Ojibwa) origin on her mother's side and German/ Jewish/Catholic heritage, on her father's side, this has meant a lifelong commitment to writing in order to maintain a sense of sanity and stability. For it is this mixed identity that continually confronts her with a sense of, as she describes it, unziemliches Verlangen, unseemly longing. Erdrich writes about the interaction between Natives and Europeans in her novels and as writer and storyteller she incorporates not one, but several cultural identities. In much of the research about Erdrich these German/American connections have been all but ignored. This article seeks to address that anomaly.

Place and the stories that come from them are an integral and inseparable part of nature. Nature is landscape and mindscape conjoined and this idea is well illustrated in the autobiographical writings of Louise Erdrich. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country is an autobiographical work by Erdrich, which was published by the National Geographical Society in 2003. In it, Erdrich explores the relationship between Books and Islands, which she argues function in disparate, but similar, cross-cultural ways. Most of the book takes place in Canada in the summer of 2002. Along with her The Blue Jay's Dance and Route 2 (co-authored with Michael Dorris) Books and Islands, although neglected, is a significant one in terms of our understanding of Erdrich and her writings. Autobiographical works by Aboriginal people are always of importance in increasing our understanding of their lives since they are both spiritual and confessional in nature and illustrate the character of dreams and stories. They also illustrate the significance of Indigenous knowledge and places for Aboriginal people.