TRAUMA NARRATIVES: WRITING HISTORY AGAINST THE GRAIN

The relations between memory and history in trauma narratives offer the opportunity to criticize historicism, defined as the one that represents the past "as it actually happened." Unlike the historical perspective, contemporary fictionists, by turning to the accounts of the vanquished, put the historical truth in check as the only way and point of arrival. This assumption is based on the benjaminian conception that there is no historical nature, but individual possibilities that make history. The article aims to analyze how the trauma experience is translated in Maria Teresa Andruetto's novel of potential youth destination Stefano and in the narrative entitled Dr Henry Selwyn, from the novel The emigrants by W. G. Sebald, in order to verify the points convergences and divergences between the constructions. In Stefano, Maria Teresa Andruetto, over 75 pages, narrates the mishaps faced by a young Italian immigrant who escapes from the post-war poverty in Italy to Argentina. In the first narrative of The emigrants, we are faced with the story of expatriate Henry Selwyn, whose life is shattered because of the Holocaust and World War II.