EDITOR'S COMMENT

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2008 by Rambo, Shelly L

Great works of literature and sacred texts have always engaged the perennial question of human suffering. Sacred texts contain powerful literary depictions of suffering, from the wrestling of Jacob to the figure of Job in Hebrew Scriptures, from the antics of the Hindu god Krishna, to the passion of Jesus in the Christian gospels. Instances of human suffering raise questions about the presence and power of the divine in response to human suffering. From Greene's whiskey priest to the Inquisitor in Dostoevsky from Nietzsche's �bermensch to the country priest of Bernanos, literary texts have also presented radical challenges to and defenses of religious discourses about suffering; authors working from within and outside of religious traditions present religious faith as an antidote to the meaninglessness of suffering or press the contradictions of religious claims to divine benevolence. The quest for meaning in the midst of suffering has presented literary and religious scholars with an equal struggle to find fitting language to speak about suffering.

The problem of suffering, however, comes to new light in what Elie Wiesel identified as the genre of testimony in the twentieth century - a century of world wars. He wrote, "If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony" (9). This genre of literature both drew attention to the ethical demands of writing and the near impossibility of doing so, given the inarticulable horrors of trauma. Maurice Blanchot's, The Writing of the Disaster, pressed this question of the form of writing and the limits of language in response to large-scale events.

Since the first diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders in 1980, the study of trauma has proliferated. From neurobiology to history, psychoanalysis to literary studies, scholars have attempted to articulate the impact of extreme and unique forms of suffering on persons, communities, and societies. Cathy Caruth, literary scholar and trauma theorist, notes in her introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, one of the first collections on the interdisciplinary study of trauma, that trauma forces each of the disciplines to "hear each other anew" in the face of shattering events of violence (4). She claims that the phenomenon of trauma moves each discipline to the limits of understanding, revealing the ways in which our familiar practices of reading and writing are bound up in a crisis of truth and truth-telling (Trauma 8).

This post-Holocaust "literary turn to trauma" has influenced scholars of religion, challenging the ways in which the question of suffering is approached and addressed within the study of religion. Scholars of Judaism and Christianity have explored theological resources within and outside of their traditions in response to the Holocaust.1 As instances of global violence persist, many of which are fueled by religious beliefs, religion scholars are increasingly pressed to think about the ways in which their texts and practices foster harm and healing. This collection features essays by scholars of religion responding to the phenomenon of trauma and its impact on a reading of texts. The authors share two things. First, they are engaged in cross-disciplinary work in the field of comparative literature, and, second, they attend to themes of evil, violence, and trauma in their research. All are pressing, as well, pre-existing conceptions of how to read and write within their respective areas of religious studies.

What would it mean to read texts in light of suffering, as it comes to new expression in the phenomenon of trauma? Some of the articles work with texts central to religious traditions - Hindu epic and Hebrew sacred texts - while others take up questions of human suffering in fiction, psychoanalytic, and theological texts. In several of the essays, the classic framework of theodicy - attempts to reconcile the goodness of God with evil - are exposed as insufficient in respect to trauma. The authors claim that readers are oriented differently in respect to these texts. The phenomenon of trauma exceeds these frameworks, and, instead, calls for a way of living amidst the ambiguities. Texts become critical in drawing readers into these ambiguities, providing ways of living more deeply into the complexities of life rather than eliding them. Throughout the collection, disciplinary boundaries - between literature and religion - are also extended and re-conceptualized. Does the new genre of testimony, invoked by Wiesel, place religion and literary scholars in a new relationship to each other - revealing the testimonial dimension of texts within both of these fields? Another thread connecting these articles is the querying of time and the ways in which religious traditions frame life temporally. Could these ancient religious traditions provide ways of orienting persons and communities in time in ways that counter the temporal distortions of trauma?