Abstract:
How do societies begin to reconcile the schizophrenic “before” and “after” worlds
experienced in the aftermath of severe social and political change? Literature of war and
revolution suggests in a powerful way that it is the dynamic act of storytelling—the
writing and rewriting of history—that represents a society’s ability to move forward. This
thesis analyzes dramatic and narrative representations of schizophrenic collective
consciousness during revolution and war in contemporary works. The split nature of a
postwar consciousness becomes evident in Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest (1990), and The
Hospital at the Time of the Revolution (1972), Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle (1994), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
(2005). Between these authors, trauma in the latter half of the twentieth century is
explored through French-colonial Algerian, post-communist Romanian, and World War
II German, Japanese and American societies. The theoretical framework through which
the primary texts are analyzed draws heavily from social psychology studies of collective
memory and trauma theory, as well as postmodern rhetoric that explores the individual’s
place in a fragmented, war-torn society, and the relationship between time and space in
identity formation.
