Traces of Trauma: Loss and Longing in Too many Men

Authors

  • Shannon Dowling Flinders University of South Australia

Keywords:

Lily Brett, Holocaust, Poland, Memory

Abstract

In both her fiction and autobiographical essays, author Lily Brett describes the process of travelling ‘home’ to Poland as an adult child of Holocaust survivors.  In a close reading of her novel Too Many Men, I will discuss the contemporary concern with returning to the ‘past’ for a sense of contemporary ‘self’ represented in this novel.  In Too Many Men the protagonist Ruth journeys to Poland with her father, visiting the sites of his former life and the places of his family’s destruction.  However, the journey represents very different things for these two characters.  Sites of memory, ‘simulation’ and the ‘trace’ are key ideas adopted in this reading.

Author Biography

  • Shannon Dowling, Flinders University of South Australia
    I am a lecturer in Australian Studies and Cultural Theory in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Flinders University of South Australia.

Downloads

Issue

Vol. 6 (2007)

Section

Articles

License

The copyright for articles in this journal is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use with proper attribution in educational and other non-commercial sectors.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.1/au/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

How to Cite

Traces of Trauma: Loss and Longing in Too many Men. (2007). Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 6, 79-90. https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/10226