Space, history and trauma in doris lessing'S short fiction set in Europe

Zusammenfassung

We live in a violent world surrounded by wars or at least dire threats of entering a nuclear or bacteriological war any minute, which makes us live in a continuous apprehension for our loved ones and ourselves. The past two wars have left their marks on those who participated, witnessed, or had to live in an environment in which one or more traumatised veterans returned home carrying history on their bodies. These adverse circumstances brought about changes in social and moral standards, the places they inhabited, and the spaces they created. Doris Lessing and her parents faced the horrors of war either vicariously or personally. Her father was wounded in the Great War and her mother was a nurse at the time of the conflict, while Doris, from a very early age, was bombarded by her parents and Rhodesian neighbours¿ continuous recollections of the events. Because of this situation, her literature has been tinted by wars either with an actual presence or hidden in the symbols, metaphors, and spaces used to construct her stories and novels. My doctoral thesis consists of literary research on the treatment of space in her short fiction set in Europe and the corpus of analysis comprises only the group of short stories written in London that depict different European spaces. The main objective of the thesis is to carry out an integral study about space in its tripartite division of physical, psychological, and socio-historical as well as an agent of traumatic representation in her short fiction set in European places. My research is approached from a humanistic perspective supported by academics such as Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991), Michel Foucault ([1967] 1984), Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), and Edward Soja (1996), among others, who have delved into the study of space from different perspectives. Regarding trauma studies, I have consulted not only its pioneers in its inclusion in Cultural Studies such as Shoshana Felman (2002), Dominick LaCapra (1994), and Cathy Caruth (1995) but also other scholars who have broadened its scope of exploration. From the literary standpoint, I analyse space through the visions of authors like Laurie Vickroy (2002), Geoffrey Hartman (2003), and Roger Luckhurst (2008), to mention just a few, who have extensively written on the topic of trauma and its effect on space. I am using the stylistic analysis applied to the recognition of different spaces while the methodology involves the comparison and study of the chosen texts in light of the theoretical frame. The scope of my analysis is limited to one novella and five short stories- written in the aftermath of the past world war from Doris Lessing¿s book Stories published in 1978. My findings will demonstrate how Doris Lessing constructs her own Poetics of Space by foregrounding the traumatic spatial marks left by the wars.