Richly nuanced and firmly grounded in literature, biography, and history, The Language of Trauma analyses three major central European writers, revealing how they incorporated and responded to psychological and historical trauma.
Exploring the period around 1900, the book delves into European travels to remote locations, where instead of the exotic, they encountered the "uncannily" familiar, a concept that influenced Freud and literary modernists. John Zilcosky examines how these experiences shaped cultural perceptions and continue to resonate with contemporary cross-cultural anxieties, highlighting the tension between the familiar and the foreign in a rapidly globalizing world.
The collection features essays that explore the transformative power of travel, illustrating its role in reshaping perceptions of the world. Each piece delves into how travel serves as a metaphor for imagination, subjectivity, and representation, offering unique insights into the interplay between exploration and personal experience.
This text argues that, perhaps surprisingly, Kafka's uniquely modern metaphorics of alienation emerges out of his complex encounter with the utopian travel discourses of his day. The author thus re-reads Kafka's major works through the lens of fin-de-sielcle travel culture.