Interlitteraria

Front Matter

Editors — 2025-12-31

The Possible Wor(l)ds of Healing: Poetics and Politics of Repair

Leena Käosaar — 2025-12-31

The Possible Wor(l)ds of Healing: Poetics and Politics of Repair

Fake Healing and Popular Biopolitics: Pro-Russian Narratives in Occupied Mariupol

Yulia Kurnyshova — 2025-12-31

This article seeks to conceptualise the nexus of vernacular narratives and biopolitics and unpack it using the empirical material of pro-Russian video bloggers operating in the occupied territories of Ukraine, namely in the city of Mariupol. Our theoretical focus is a combination of biopolitics and critical media studies. Our main research question is: how – through what semantic tools – does the occupier propagate narratives and imageries supportive of the new regime as a biopolitical construct? Our methodology is grounded in visual analysis of several dozen videos, mainly produced by vloggers who position themselves as local (citizens of Mariupol), but whose content can be qualified as explicitly pro-Moscow, Russia-friendly and Ukraine-sceptic.

Why I Record Interviews with Ukrainian Refugees: An Attempt at Autoethnography

Iryna Koval-Fuchylo — 2025-12-31

In this article I try to explain the main reasons for my project: people want their stories to be preserved. In interviews with them, people said for example, “although someone is interested in this”, “now [after the interview] it’s a little easier for me”, “at last I can talk about it”. The interviewees were the people I met in Ukrainian refugees help centres. They are people who have decided to live; many people are depressed and are silent. I can’t help them, but I have to know who they are as this helps me understand other refugees. Hot-trace records help to track the dynamics of the narrative tradition about the refugee experience, both now and in the future. I consider this project to be a professional duty.

The most important characteristic of the interviews I recorded is that they were conducted using participant observation, because I was in similar conditions to other refugees. This method made it possible to draw important conclusions about the reasons for refusing interviews, favourite and taboo topics in the stories, and the influence of grand narratives on what the storytellers say. Being among refugees made it possible to see how different the situations of Ukrainians abroad are: some live with their whole families, while others live with an unhealed wound due to the loss of a relative; someone has a husband on the front line, someone has relatives left behind in the occupied areas; someone has lost a home, community of neighbours, job, and someone has left a more or less peaceful territory in search of a better life, taking advantage of the opportunities extended to Ukrainians through temporary protection.

A typical reaction of storytellers to their own interviews is to note that the conversation had a positive effect on their psychological self-organisation. People are grateful that they were listened to, that they were able to understand a lot for themselves; they are pleased that their story was interesting to someone else. This, among other things, is the importance of our work.

Paper Life: Nadia Olijnyk’s Notebooks

Paul Longley Arthur — 2025-12-31

My Ukrainian grandmother Nadia Olijnyk lived in Adelaide, South Australia, from the time she arrived as a postwar refugee in 1949 until her death at the age of 95 in 2009. She left a bundle of notebooks in which she had written down her memories, mostly in the final decade of her life. They include stories about her life in Ukraine, including from the early 1940s when her home city of Kharkov was at the epicentre of a series of momentous battles. This paper has two purposes. The primary purpose is to present one of Nadia’s stories as a first step towards bringing her notebooks to light with a view to sharing and protecting them in a spirit of intergenerational custodianship. The second is to offer a framework for understanding them by engaging with ideas and theories that relate to memory, self-narration, and writing as a means of post-traumatic healing.

The Poetics of Postmemory: The Afterlife of Memory in the Wake of War and Flight

Maryam Adjam — 2025-12-31

Focusing on postmemory, the memories of the third generation of Estonian refugees in Sweden today, tracing remnants of family tales in the aftermath of World War Two and the flight from Estonia to Sweden in 1944, this paper analysis the concept of ‘afterness’ in memory work and the role of imagination in rendering memories legible and visible. Framed as witnesses of the master narrative of history, a narrative focusing the chain of events, establishing the has-been of this after, these family tales are constantly confronted with the demands of truth seeking. Yet the life of postmemories in the aftermath of devastating events is often a puzzle of fragmented memory traces that requires an imaginative investment in order to interweave different layers of memory and fragments into a tale of postmemory’s life with an after. Placing the lived experience of the afterness between life and imagination, postmemories witness history as a Benjaminian living act of recognition of the has-been in the on-going while disputing the testimony they are bearing witness to by using imagination, an act of playfulness, despite the event. A poetics of the afterness, of postmemory’s lingering between fact and fantasy, bringing the lived experience to the fore through the ambivalences added by memory’s being with an after.

“I’m not one of those strong people”: Traumatic Experiences in Gulag Letters

Giedrė Šmitienė — 2025-12-31

Letters exchanged between people encourage a shift from emphasising individualism and separation to highlighting relationships. Even in complex traumatic situations, it is helpful to view them as shared experiences, as this increases ways to cope with trauma and demonstrates that correspondence can be a form of healing.

Based on a collection of Gulag letters gathered by Lithuanian museologist Kazimiera Galaunienė (Kairiūkštytė) (1924–2016), this article features over 550 items held at the Galaunė House and Museum, part of the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art in Kaunas. The core of the collection consists of letters written by Kazimiera herself and her younger sister Janina, who were detained in various prison camps between 1953 and 1956. A notable section contains letters from relatives and friends sent to the camps. The collection preserves the network of correspondence and provides insight into the traumatic experiences from multiple perspectives. It highlights the trauma faced by young imprisoned women, which spreads to their relatives, penetrating their daily lives. The ongoing relationships turn out to be a strong motivation for overcoming trauma.

The article presents the modality of non-life as a specific experience prevailing in the prison camp, inseparable from slowing time, when years are indistinguishable from decades. Although the letters from the camp are limited by external and internal censorship, they carry the pain of survival in the camp as well as numerous daily prison details that provide at least a partial understanding of past personal and political historical events, which remain relevant today as a healing dimension of contemporary culture.

Acceptance, Healing and Reflective Nostalgia in the Works of Elin Toona and Agate Nesaule

Martin Nõmm — 2025-12-31

The Estonian and Latvian diaspora communities that formed in the United States after World War Two anchored their identity and cultural practices in hopes of survival and eventual freedom for their occupied homelands. Younger generations, increasingly distanced from direct ties to these homelands, often faced tensions and pressures within their communities to maintain ethnic and cultural continuity. The arts have served both as a means to affirm diaspora identity and as a vital space to articulate internal conflicts, including generational tension and cultural dissonance.

This article examines the novels Kaleviküla viimne tütar (The Last Daughter of Kaleviküla, 1988) and Lost Midsummers: A Novel of Women’s Friendship in Exile (2018), alongside the memoirs Into Exile: A Life Story of War and Peace (2013) and A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile (1995), by Estonian and Latvian exile authors Elin Toona-Gottschalk and Agate Nesaule. These works provide rich portrayals of the ambivalent – or even negative – and often silenced experiences of exile across two distinct yet parallel communities. Narrating displacement, loss of identity, in-betweenness and violence, they reveal how individual journeys in exile negotiate trauma, identity, and belonging.

Through the lens of reflective nostalgia, these narratives illustrate that healing from displacement does not require the reversal or restoration of loss but rather its acceptance in all its complexity and contradiction. The arts thus create pathways for reconciliation and nuanced understanding within diaspora life.

Somatic Syntax: Ban en Banlieue, Filmic Prose, and the Representation of Trauma

Gabriella Graceffo — 2025-12-31

In her “failed” novel Ban en Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil claims that the text is a “novel-shaped space” that not only resists narrative but investigates the dangers of literature related to stories of trauma. In traditional, linear books that include trauma, violence is inevitable and often portrayed as a spectacle, easily leaning toward objectification. Instead, Kapil’s work suggests that fragmented, non-linear narratives can be more representative of the cognitive and physical impacts of trauma while also deferring the violence to avoid trauma porn and imagine new narrative possibilities. This is especially relevant in the case of sexual trauma to female bodies. Through interrupted narration, grammar, naming, and auto-sacrifice, Ban en Banlieue develops a somatic syntax based on images and felt in the body. The intermedial book can be read as filmic prose: a collection of film strips from a bloody cutting room floor, visual fragments in text that embody PTSD symptoms, simultaneity, and memory patterns not usually present in literature. Yet despite the imagistic nature, the text asserts subjecthood for its characters, rather than objectification, offering a new syntax of storytelling that questions the safety of literature and asserts the necessity of new literary forms when representing trauma.

Poetics of Trauma in Olga Ravn’s My Work: Towards Matricentric Writing

Marianne Lind — 2025-12-31

Over the past two decades, numerous novels and memoirs have explored contemporary motherhood. In contrast to idealised portrayals of mothers, new narratives of motherhood have emerged that foreground the subjective maternal experience. The evolving discourse often invokes ironic and critical self-consciousness, addressing questions related to work, sexuality, and identity. The works frequently explore the more complex and often troubling aspects of motherhood, including controversial topics such as maternal ambivalence, maternal trauma, voluntary childlessness, and queer mothering. My Work (2020) by the Danish author Olga Ravn belongs to the emerging canon of new motherhood narratives. It is a work of autobiographical fiction, documenting the periods of pregnancy and the early years with a child. My Work deals with the subjective maternal experience, exploring issues related to maternal subjectivity, ambivalence and trauma, blending personal narrative with broader cultural critique.

In this paper, I discuss Olga Ravn’s novel My Work through literary trauma theory and explore how trauma and survival, disruption and continuity, absence and loss shape the poetics of Ravn’s novel. After outlining the basic features of traumatic experience and trauma literature, I will explore the poetics of My Work, more specifically, how stylistic features attributed to trauma literature, most importantly those of fragmentation and repetition, are employed to convey the lived experience of postpartum trauma. My focus will also be on the ways in which postpartum trauma reconfigures patterns of temporality, narrative coherence and voice. To conclude, I will show how the novel represents a working-through of an experience of discontinuity of narrative identity and a creation of maternal subjectivity.

Estonian Elegy: Forms of Mourning in Contemporary Poetry

Rebekka Lotman — 2025-12-31

This article examines how contemporary Estonian poetry engages with the experience of death and mourning. Focusing on seven twenty-firstcentury collections devoted entirely to the loss of a loved one, it shows how bereavement generates distinct poetic strategies that reshape both the lyric form and the self. The study proposes a fourfold typology of mourning poetics: memorial, which sustains the presence of the deceased through memory and image; self-transformative, which charts the mourner’s inner reconfiguration; displaced, in which grief is refracted into fragments, objects, or irony; and abyssal, where mourning resists narrative and dwells in a state of existential suspension. Through close readings of works by Triin Paja, Berit Petolai, Vootele Ruusmaa, Martin Algus, Peeter Sauter, Anti Saar, and Tõnis Vilu, the article demonstrates how Estonian elegy continues to evolve in the twentyfirst century. Rather than resolving loss, these texts explore its paradoxes, transforming personal bereavement into a broader meditation on memory, temporality, and cultural identity.

Formal Analysis in Research on Small/Minor Literatures: Two Cases Compared

Jon Mathieu — 2025-12-31

This article compares two studies on small/minor literatures: one by Fabienne Gilbertz on Luxembourgish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and one by Clà Riatsch on Rhaeto-Romanic in the Swiss Confederation. The design and the argument of the article are based on two methodological considerations. First, both studies take a fairly comprehensive view of their literatures, thereby taking advantage of the benefits that studying small/minor literatures has over studying major literatures. Knowledge of a significant percentage of texts from personal reading and experience can be important for many questions. Second, the two studies differ in their emphasis of contextual and textual components. Gilbertz’s focus is on the sociolinguistic context, Riatsch focuses on formal literary analysis. The juxtaposition of the two cases aims to examine the effects of the chosen method on the assessment of the epigonism and repetitiveness or creativity of the respective literature. These are key judgments in the area. In this way, the article addresses a topic that is particularly problematic in postcolonial studies – the role of formal text analysis and aesthetics.

Thresholds to Infinity: Towards a Typology of Haunted House Narratives

Helen Roostma — 2025-12-31

Stories of houses that are somehow wrong have a long history across languages, cultures, and time. Broadly speaking, a haunted house requires two primary characteristics: a distinct atmosphere of unease and a historical context. The latter of these, as might be expected, changes over time, meaning that at different points, some types of haunted house narrative are more prevalent than others. Moreover, the haunted house narrative has not been limited by media or genre: extant examples range from comedy films to science fiction novels to walking simulator video games. Because of this, the existing body of work which can be viewed as the haunted house narrative consists of a great number of texts, with more appearing every year. This paper argues that, in order to approach the haunted house narrative productively, particularly in broad-scope studies, an organisational method is required. I argue that contemporary haunted house narratives can be categorised based on their storytelling mode, drawing from their transtextual interactions with the existing body of haunted house fiction. In this I identify the gothic mode, the weird mode, and the horror mode, all of which I contend to be present in contemporary haunted house fiction through recognisable shared formal and thematic characteristics.

The Lithuanian High School Literary Canon: Reconstructing the Developments of a Century

Viktorija Šeina — 2025-12-31

This paper reconstructs the developments of the Lithuanian high school literary canon from 1918 to 2018. Drawing on the theoretical framework of descriptive canon research, attributed to the theoretical field of cultural sociology, we investigate how ideological shifts have shaped education policies as well as the selection and interpretation of literature taught in secondary education over the past hundred years. We argue that the school, more than any other institution, has the power to establish and disseminate normative literary values across generations. Using a large corpus of published and archived sources, we examine how Lithuanian literature was defined in the country’s high schools, how its historical narrative was modelled, and what criteria were used by the authors of high school literary curricula and learning materials to select writers and their works during three historical periods: the First Republic of Lithuania (1918–1940), the Soviet occupation (1940–1990), and the post-independence era (since 1990). We analysed not only the canon of authors and works of literature, but also their dominant interpretation in the learning materials of each specific period. This reconstruction of the Lithuanian high school literary canon contributes to broader comparative research on the formation of literary canons, particularly in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Kaléidoscope de la lecture dans "Par Dieu, cette histoire est mon histoire !" de Abdelfattah Kilito

Abdelouahed Hajji — 2025-12-31

Résumé. Cette contribution se concentre sur le kaléidoscope qui caractérise l’oeuvre de Kilito, Par Dieu, cette histoire est mon histoire ! L’oeuvre s’articule autour de trois histoires. La première, celle de Hasan al-Basri, est tirée des Mille et Une Nuits. La seconde, celle de Hasan Miro avec sa femme Nora, problématise le statut d’un livre prétendument maléfique, La satire des deux vizirs d’Abu al-Hayyane al-Tawhidi, oeuvre qui souligne l’échec de la relation entre le détenteur du pouvoir et l’intellectuel ; la troisième histoire raconte les aventures de Julius Morris, qui a travaillé sur le livre maudit. Nous analyserons d’abord le décloisonnement entre les récits, tout en mettant en évidence le statut du livre prétendument maléfique. Enfin, nous nous intéresserons à la structure de l’oeuvre, c’est-à-dire à sa composition et à son esthétique.

Abstract. The kaleidoscope of reading in Abdelfattah Kilito's Par Dieu, cette histoire est mon histoire !. This contribution examines the kaleidoscopic nature of Kilito’s work Par Dieu, cette histoire est mon histoire !. The book is organized around three narratives. The first, that of Hasan al-Basri, is drawn from The Arabian Nights. The second recounts the story of Hasan Miro and his wife Nora, which problematizes the status of an allegedly “evil” book: Abu al-Hayyane al-Tawhidi’s The Satire of the Two Viziers, a text that underscores the failure of the relationship between power and the intellectual. The third tale follows the adventures of Julius Morris, who has previously engaged with the cursed book. We begin by analyzing the interplay and decompartmentalization among these narratives, while emphasizing the role of the allegedly “evil” book. Finally, we turn to the structure of the work, focusing on its composition and aesthetics.

About the Authors

About Authors — 2025-12-31

About the Authors