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Representation of Psychic Trauma in Ukrainian Modernist Prose
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- Author / Creator
- Polianska, Daria A
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Trauma is unspeakable and hard to comprehend. Thus, it is through the artistic expression of the internal and external conflicts caused by traumatic events that we can come to a deeper understanding of trauma. I consider three Ukrainian texts about WWI and the Revolution of 1917 as important literary testimonies of a people’s traumatized psyche. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on the representation of psychic trauma in works by Osyp Turians'kyi, Mykola Khvyl'ovyi and Borys Antonenko-Davydovych.
I discuss how these authors write about subjective traumatic experiences as having roots in social life. To do that, I perform close readings of their texts from the perspectives of modernist styles, I employ the analysis of narrative modes for presenting consciousness (Dorrit Cohn) and I explore the role of literary dreams and dreamlike states in indicating the protagonists’ psychological breakdown. I claim that modernist writers depict the shift from conscious to unconscious states of mind, revealing the invisible effects of collective political and ideological pressures on a person’s consciousness. I suggest that by presenting the personal trauma of their protagonists’ through daydreaming, hypnagogic imagery, hallucinations, and madness—as well as dreams per se—these writers delineate the collective tragedy of the Ukrainian nation during war and revolution.
Ergo, this study considers the relationship between psychological, stylistic and narrative aspects of trauma prose as well as the literary devices used by the writers. The analysis of artistic ways to represent traumatic experiences aids in recognizing the transhistorical impact of trauma as well as the connection between past events and their effect on the realities of the present. -
- Graduation date
- Fall 2019
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.