Announcement of special issue: Reading, Feeling, and Studying Narratives of Trauma, Crisis, and Illness.

The planned special issue of the journal ELLA – Education, Literature, Language investigates the potential of literature (and other media) to raise the emotional engagement of readers and ethical reflection, as well as the (transformative) processing of individual and collective traumatic memory. In their respective articles, the contributors to the special issue focus on examples from various narrative genres and media and how they represent, negotiate, and tackle complex experiences of crisis.

A crucial point of departure of this special issue is the notion of the embodied nature of language, literature, and reading (Mangen and Schilhab 2012; Hillesund, Schilhab, and Mangen 2022), as well as the embodied reality of trauma. As research has shown, traumatic experiences reshape both the body and the brain of an individual – and even societies as a whole, as in the case of collective trauma (Van der Kolk 2014; Madigan 2020; Neria and Ataria 2016).

Highlighting the relevance of emotions in reading, studying, and teaching narratives of trauma, crisis, and illness, the special issue explores the concept of ‘sensuous knowledge’ developed by Salami (2020, 12). Referring to the Yorùbá cultural wisdom, she distinguishes between ‘ogbon-ori’ (intellectual intelligence) and ‘obgon-inu’ (emotional intelligence). This special issue touches upon the complementary nature of both forms of intelligence as well as an approach of ‘collective affective ownership’ within educational settings as advanced by El-Tayeb in Hanhardt et al. (2020, 59). Salami’s notion of ‘sensuous knowledge’ also links to the so-called 4E-approaches within current cognitive sciences, referring to “the enactive, embedded, embodied, and extended qualities of the mind” (Kukkonen and Caracciolo 2014, 261). Instead of conceptualizing the human mind as a computational apparatus for information processing, 4E-approaches understand the mind to be “shaped by our evolutionary history, bodily make-up, and sensorimotor possibilities, and as arising out of close dialogue with other minds, in intersubjective interactions and cultural practices” (Kukkonen and Caracciolo 2014, 261– 262).

In line with ELLA’s focus on bringing together both discipline-oriented research within the subject areas of linguistics, literary and cultural studies, and didactic research within the different language subjects, the contributions of the special issue pay attention to several main premises and goals:

1. They look at language(s) as the means through which readers access texts and react to texts.
2. They investigate how literature and languages (understood both as means of communication and as aesthetic-stylistic approaches to narratives) contribute to educating the mind as well as the heart – that is, the deeply embodied, enactive, socially embedded, and affective nature of the human mind-body (Colombetti 2014).
3. They highlight the notion of ‘affective and poetic truth’, a truth that is not quantifiable but a relevant truth (Lionnet & Jean François 2016).
4. They combine literary/media case studies with didactic approaches and contextualised class teaching experiences that address both the individual side and the social/collective side of trauma, crisis, and illness narratives.

Literature
Colombetti, Giovanna (2014): The Feeling Body. Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge: MIT.
Hanhardt, Christina B. and Jasbir K. Puar, with Neel Ahuja, Paul Amar, Aniruddha Dutta, Fatima El-Tayeb, Kwame Holmes, and Sherene Seikaly (2020): “Beyond Trigger Warnings: Safety, Securitization, and Queer Left Critique.” Social Text 145, vol. 38, no. 4: 49–76.
Hillesund, Terje, Theresa Schilhab, and Anne Mangen (2022): Text Materialities, Affordances, and the Embodied Turn in the Study of Reading. Frontiers in Psychology 13 (827058): 1-9. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.827058
Kukkonen, Karin and Marco Caracciolo (2014): Introduction: What is the “second generation?” Style 48(3): 261–274.
Lionnet, Françoise, and Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François. “Literary Routes: Migration, Islands, and the Creative Economy.” PMLA 131, no. 5 (2016): 1222–1238.
Madigan, Todd (2020): “Theories of Cultural Trauma.” In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, edited by Colin Davies and Hanna Meretoja, 45–53. London: Routledge.
Mangen, Anne and Theresa Schilhab (2012): An embodied view of reading: Theoretical considerations, empirical findings, and educational implications. In Skriv! Les! 1: Artikler fra den første nordiske konferansen om skriving, lesing og literacy, edited by Synnøve Matre and Atle Skaftun, 285–300. Trondheim: Akademika.
Neria, Yuval and Yochai Ataria (2016): “Conclusion: Trauma and Culture: How Trauma Can Shape the Human Mind.” In Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, edited by Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, Yuval Neria, 393–395. Cham: Springer.
Salami, Minna (2020): Sensuous Knowledge. A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. London: Zed Books.
Van der Kolk, Bessel (2014): The Body Keeps the Score. Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin.

Estimated publication 2024/25. 

Contributors (in alphabetical order):

Annika Mörte Alling (HiØ) – Wladimir Chavez (HiØ) – Johanna Chovanec (University of Vienna) – Øyvind Gjems Fjeldbu (HiØ) – Yasemin Hacioglu (Høgskulen i Volda) – Natalia Igl (HiØ) – Anna Lindhé (HiØ) – Olga Michael (Independent Scholar, Cyprus) – Rémi Armand Tchokothe (University of Vienna).