Pat Barker

This article examines the depiction in Pat Barker's Regeneration of Dr. Lewis Yealland, notorious First World War disciplinary therapist. I demonstrate how Barker attunes her novel to contemporary discourses of torture and witnessing in order to update a long tradition of opposing Yealland with his contemporary, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, putting Regeneration at the intersection of lively debates about trauma, psychoanalysis, and the psychology of torture.

The present paper seeks to critically read Pat Barker's Regeneration in terms of Cathy Caruth's psychoanalytic study of trauma. This analysis attempts to trace the concepts of latency, post-traumatic stress disorders, traumatic memory, and trauma in Barker's novel in order to explore how trauma and history are interrelated in the narrative of past history and, particularly, in the history of World War I. The present paper also demonstrates how Barker's novel Regeneration acts as the narrative of trauma that vocalizes the silenced history of shell-shocked soldiers of World War I to represent British society, the history that has been concealed due to social and individual factors. The study thus investigates the dissociative disorders which are experienced by traumatized survivors of World War I as the aftermath of traumatic experiences of wartime. In addition, it argues how time moves for the traumatized victim and how the notion of latency in terms of Caruth's theory is traceable in Barker's novel. In Regeneration, the traumatized survivors are haunted with traumatic memory of past history; furthermore, past history constantly disrupts their present and the victims are in continuous shift from present time to past time. Time thus loses its linearity in the narrative of traumatized survivors.

The present paper addresses Pat Barker’s Another World in the light of Cathy Caruth’s psychoanalytical notions concerning the traumatic experiences of the subjects. This analysis attempts to trace the concepts of latency, post-traumatic stress disorders, trauma of fratricide, and domestic trauma in Barker’s novel in order to explore how trauma and history are interrelated in the narrative of history and, particularly, in what manners trauma is transmittable trans-generationally. The present paper also demonstrates how Barker’s novel Another World acts as the narrative of trauma that vocalizes the silenced history of shell-shocked soldiers of World War I to affect the domestic and national arenas of British society, the history that has been concealed due to social and individual factors. The study thus investigates the dissociative disorders, which are experienced by traumatized survivors of World War I as the aftermath of traumatic experiences of wartime. In addition, it argues how time moves for the traumatized victim and how the notion of latency in terms of Caruth’s theory is traceable in Barker’s novel. In Another World, the traumatized survivor is haunted with traumatic memory of his past history, that constantly disrupts his present and the victim is in continuous shift from present time to past time. Time thus loses its linearity in the narrative of traumatized survivor.

Have the terrorist attacks of September 11 shifted the moral coordinates of contemporary fiction? And how might such a shift, reflected in narrative strategies and forms, relate to other themes and trends emerging with the globalization of literature? This book pursues these questions through works written in the wake of 9/11 and examines the complex intersection of ethics and narrative that has defined a significant portion of British and American fiction over the past decade.

Don DeLillo, Pat Barker, Aleksandar Hemon, Lorraine Adams, Michael Cunningham, and Patrick McGrath are among the authors Georgiana Banita considers. Their work illustrates how post-9/11 literature expresses an ethics of equivocation—in formal elements of narrative, in a complex scrutiny of justice, and in tense dialogues linking this fiction with the larger political landscape of the era. Through a broad historical and cultural lens, Plotting Justice reveals links between the narrative ethics of post-9/11 fiction and events preceding and following the terrorist attacks—events that defined the last half of the twentieth century, from the Holocaust to the Balkan War, and those that 9/11 precipitated, from war in Afghanistan to the Abu Ghraib scandal. Challenging the rhetoric of the war on terror, the book honors the capacity of literature to articulate ambiguous forms of resistance in ways that reconfigure the imperatives and responsibilities of narrative for the twenty-first century.

6.1/2020 issue of the Polish Journal of English Studies.
Contents:
From Silence to Dialogic Discourse in Selected Short Stories by Ali Smith by Ema Jelínková, Palacký University, Olomouc
Immense Risks: the Migrant Crisis, Magical Realism, and Realist “Magic”
in Mohsin Hamid’s Novel Exit West by Ewa Kowal, Jagiellonian University in Kraków
Summoning the Voices of the Silenced: Pat Barker’s
The Silence of the Girls, a Feminist Retelling of Homer’s The Iliad by Tuhin Shuvra Sen, Department of English, University of Chittagong
Political Instability and Whig Inefficiency in Britain in the Post-Pitt Era by György Borus, University of Debrecen
Book Reviews:
Magda Dragu, 2020. Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde
Collage and Montage (New York and London: Routledge) by Wojciech Drąg, University of Wrocław
Review: Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai (eds.), 2020. Twenty-First-Century Readings of E. M. Forster’s “Maurice” (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press) by Anna Kwiatkowska, University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn

This essay interrogates the nature, limits, and effects of the juxtaposition of Great Britain and Melanesia that takes place in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), the final installment of the much-lauded Regeneration trilogy. Published two years before the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, which marked the unofficial end of the British Empire, and four years after the end of the neocolonial charade of the first Gulf War, The Ghost Road brings its readers back to the beginning of the twentieth century, cannily meshing a carefully researched portrayal of the First World War with its protagonist’s dreams and memories of a Melanesian society suffocating under the oppressive weight of colonial law. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia, we read the success of the Booker Prize-winning novel as reflecting a deep-seated anxiety about the downfall of empire(s) that continues to characterize political life in the West. The novel’s strength lies in the way it highlights the insidious workings of class prejudices on the front lines, the complex matrix of sexuality, duty, and friendship that defined relationships between men in the trenches, and the reshuffling of traditional gender roles that the war brought about both at home and abroad. In spite of its merits, however, the transformative and challenging confrontation with the human cost of Britain’s imperial transgressions that The Ghost Road offers is consistently deferred and masked behind its more visible portrayal of the melancholic fantasy of a racially homogenous, tragic, and exclusively Western First World War.

The present paper addresses Pat Barker’s Another World in the light of Cathy Caruth’s psychoanalytical notions concerning the traumatic experiences of the subjects. This analysis attempts to trace the concepts of latency, post-traumatic stress disorders, trauma of fratricide, and domestic trauma in Barker’s novel in order to explore how trauma and history are interrelated in the narrative of history and, particularly, in what manners trauma is transmittable trans-generationally. The present paper also demonstrates how Barker’s novel Another World acts as the narrative of trauma that vocalizes the silenced history of shell-shocked soldiers of World War I to affect the domestic and national arenas of British society, the history that has been concealed due to social and individual factors. The study thus investigates the dissociative disorders, which are experienced by traumatized survivors of World War I as the aftermath of traumatic experiences of wartime. In addition, it argues how...

Pat Baker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991-1995) represents WWI from what could be called a home-front perspective. Barker focuses on traumatised soldiers undergoing treatment for ‘shell-shock,’ a phenomenon nowadays known as post-traumatic stress disorder. In her stories of trauma, which do not foreground the war itself, but rather its devastating effects on the human psyche, silence is a recurring issue. As I will argue in my paper, silence is first of all depicted as a symptom of ‘shell-shock,’ as for example in the case of Billy Prior, one of Barker’s protagonists, who is sent home because a gruesome event in the trenches has robbed him off his ability to speak. Within this context, silence is represented not only as a strategy of repressing traumatic memories, but also as an act of defiance as soldiers who return from the front either mute or stammering are shown to unconsciously rebel against the slaughter caused by industrialised warfare. Breaking the soldiers’ silence thus turns out to be inherently ambiguous as it implies both healing and oppression.
What is more, Barker employs silence as a marker of both gender and class. Having the neurologist and social anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers repeatedly elaborate on the British class system and on the effects the war has on male self-fashioning, the novels argue that trench warfare forces soldiers into the role of the silenced other which patriarchy has traditionally ascribed to women. In short, Barker’s Regeneration trilogy uses the aspect of silence to link its discussion of trauma to the crisis of masculinity brought about by WWI, thus providing a fictional meta-commentary upon the impact WWI had on British society and culture.

The present paper addresses Pat Barker’s Another World in the light of Cathy Caruth’s psychoanalytical notions concerning the traumatic experiences of the subjects. This analysis attempts to trace the concepts of latency, post-traumatic stress disorders, trauma of fratricide, and domestic trauma in Barker’s novel in order to explore how trauma and history are interrelated in the narrative of history and, particularly, in what manners trauma is transmittable trans-generationally. The present paper also demonstrates how Barker’s novel Another World acts as the narrative of trauma that vocalizes the silenced history of shell-shocked soldiers of World War I to affect the domestic and national arenas of British society, the history that has been concealed due to social and individual factors. The study thus investigates the dissociative disorders, which are experienced by traumatized survivors of World War I as the aftermath of traumatic experiences of wartime. In addition, it argues how...

The present paper addresses Pat Barker's Another World in the light of Cathy Caruth's psychoanalytical notions concerning the traumatic experiences of the subjects. This analysis attempts to trace the concepts of latency, post-traumatic stress disorders, trauma of fratricide, and domestic trauma in Barker's novel in order to explore how trauma and history are interrelated in the narrative of history and, particularly, in what manners trauma is transmittable trans-generationally. The present paper also demonstrates how Barker's novel Another World acts as the narrative of trauma that vocalizes the silenced history of shell-shocked soldiers of World War I to affect the domestic and national arenas of British society, the history that has been concealed due to social and individual factors. The study thus investigates the dissociative disorders, which are experienced by traumatized survivors of World War I as the aftermath of traumatic experiences of wartime. In addition, it argues how time moves for the traumatized victim and how the notion of latency in terms of Caruth's theory is traceable in Barker's novel. In Another World, the traumatized survivor is haunted with traumatic memory of his past history, that constantly disrupts his present and the victim is in continuous shift from present time to past time. Time thus loses its linearity in the narrative of traumatized survivor.

My concern in this paper is a distinctly postmodern one: what happens when those who record – or, more specifically, those who use language to establish history and to deepen the relief of memory – come to the realisation that their tool of recording (language) is in fact a tool of fictionalisation? To put history or memory into writing is to construct an artificial signifier in place of the event or thing itself. Contemporary historical novelists such as J.M. Coetzee and Pat Barker seem to understand this and I argue that the ultimate outcome of this realisation is narrative abortion. Examining Coetzee’s novel 'Foe' and Barker’s 'The Eye in the Door', it becomes clear that characters in both history and fiction are brought into existence only through observation. Without record, without language, they would cease to exist at all. Once acknowledged, characters and events are metafictionally exposed by their authors as constructs. Language inhabits not only the author’s ability to record, but record’s ability to be. It is because of this realisation that narrative abortion occurs. This is not to say that these characters or events are themselves fictitious, but rather, that they can only be depicted through their own narrativisation. Thus, the operation is abandoned as unworthy of that which it attempts to convey.

This article analyzes the representation of ethics in Pat Barker’s novel Double Vision (2003), exploring the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the communities and individuals aggregated in the novel. In particular, it examines the ways in which an internationalization of empathy (shored up by media representation of global war, especially through the journalism of attachment) dovetails with the failure of the individual to internalize sympathy in its emotional underpinnings. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, which Barker places in the broader historical and geographical context of war atrocities and crimes, thus mark the point where the internationalization of empathy precipitates its domestic failure. By applying to the novel the critical apparatus on the cataleptic condition as proposed by ethicist Martha Nussbaum, this essay reveals the personal risks and benefits associated with the rotation of representational ethics around an international axis.

Nella narrativa degli ultimi vent'anni si è assistito a un fenomeno di rielaborazione e risemantizzazione dei classici greci e latini in chiave femminile: le autrici sono in maggioranza donne e le protagoniste sono eroine del mito e della leggenda eroica, le cui vicende sono narrate da un punto di vista femminile. Questo contributo mira a esaminare questi romanzi per comprendere se essi rappresentino un fenomeno unitario nel quadro della cultura contemporanea o nel quadro delle esigenze del mercato editoriale. Molti di essi sono presentati dalle autrici o dalla critica come “femministi”: si cercherà dunque di chiarire in che senso si esplichi questo femminismo e a quale visione faccia riferimento. Infine si farà cenno al rapporto di questa tipologia romanzesca con il dibattito sull'attualità dei classici e sulla controversa questione della cosiddetta cancel culture.

In the last twenty years fiction has witnessed a phenomenon of re-elaboration and re-semantization of Greek and Latin classics in a female key: the authors are mostly women and the protagonists are heroines of myth and heroic legend, whose events are narrated from a female point of view. This contribution aims to examine these novels in order to understand whether they represent a unitary phenomenon within the framework of contemporary culture or within the framework of the demands of the publishing market. Many of these novels are presented by the authors or the critics as “feminist”: we will try to clarify in what sense this feminism is expressed and to which vision it refers. Finally, the relationship of this type of novel to the debate on the relevance of the classics and the controversial question of the so-called cancel culture will be mentioned.

The present paper addresses Pat Barker's Another World in the light of Cathy Caruth's psychoanalytical notions concerning the traumatic experiences of the subjects. This analysis attempts to trace the concepts of latency, post-traumatic stress disorders, trauma of fratricide, and domestic trauma in Barker's novel in order to explore how trauma and history are interrelated in the narrative of history and, particularly, in what manners trauma is transmittable trans-generationally. The present paper also demonstrates how Barker's novel Another World acts as the narrative of trauma that vocalizes the silenced history of shell-shocked soldiers of World War I to affect the domestic and national arenas of British society, the history that has been concealed due to social and individual factors. The study thus investigates the dissociative disorders, which are experienced by traumatized survivors of World War I as the aftermath of traumatic experiences of wartime. In additio...

This essay interrogates the nature, limits, and effects of the juxtaposition of Great Britain and Melanesia that takes place in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), the final installment of the much-lauded Regeneration trilogy. Published two years before the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, which marked the unofficial end of the British Empire, and four years after the end of the neocolonial charade of the first Gulf War, The Ghost Road brings its readers back to the beginning of the twentieth century, cannily meshing a carefully researched portrayal of the First World War with its protagonist’s dreams and memories of a Melanesian society suffocating under the oppressive weight of colonial law. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia, we read the success of the Booker Prize-winning novel as reflecting a deep-seated anxiety about the downfall of empire(s) that continues to characterize political life in the West. The novel’s strength lies in the way it highlights the insidious workings of class prejudices on the front lines, the complex matrix of sexuality, duty, and friendship that defined relationships between men in the trenches, and the reshuffling of traditional gender roles that the war brought about both at home and abroad. In spite of its merits, however, the transformative and challenging confrontation with the human cost of Britain’s imperial  transgressions that The Ghost Road offers is consistently deferred and masked behind its more visible portrayal of the melancholic fantasy of a racially homogenous, tragic, and exclusively Western First World War.