European Journal of English Studies

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‘Beyond trauma’ The uses of the past in twenty-

first century Europe

Jacek Gutorow , Jerzy Jarniewicz & David Kennedy

To cite this article: Jacek Gutorow , Jerzy Jarniewicz & David Kennedy (2010) ‘Beyond trauma’
The uses of the past in twenty-first century Europe, European Journal of English Studies, 14:1, 1-9,
DOI: 10.1080/13825571003588304

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Jacek Gutorow, Jerzy Jarniewicz and
David Kennedy

‘BEYOND TRAUMA’
The uses of the past in twenty-first century
Europe

William Gibson’s most recent novel Spook Country (2008) features an artist, Alberto
Corales, who uses Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates to produce ‘spatially
tagged’, ‘locative’ hypermedia art (Gibson, 2008: 24). One of his pieces is
experienced by donning a visor on Sunset Boulevard and seeing a virtual recreation of
the 1993 death of Hollywood actor River Phoenix from a drugs overdose outside The
Viper Room nightclub (9–10). Corales’s curator Odile Richard, who has been
curating this type of art ‘everywhere’ (24), remarks that ‘Alberto is concerned with
history as internalized space . . . . He sees this internalized space emerge from trauma.
Always, from trauma’ (8). Spook Country continues an interest in trauma narrative that
dominated Gibson’s previous novel Pattern Recognition (2004). Here, Cayce Pollard, a
‘‘‘coolhunter’’ . . . a dowser in the world of global marketing’ (Gibson, Pattern
Recognition: 2) whose father ‘went missing’ (286) in the 9/11 attacks on the World
Trade Center, finds herself on the track of a curiously addictive online film known as
‘the footage’. The film turns out to be made by Nora who was injured in a Russian
Mafia bomb attack on her family and is looked after by her twin sister Stella. Before
the bomb, Nora had had a 16-minute short film shown at Cannes; after the bomb, she
edited it down to a single frame: ‘A bird. In flight. Not even in focus. Its wings,
against gray cloud’ (288). We also learn that Nora self-harmed after seeing the attack
on the World Trade Center. Now, with a single bomb fragment lodged between the
lobes of her brain, Nora produces the ‘footage’ from scraps of found video:

Her consciousness, Cayce understands, somehow bounded by or bound to the

T-shaped fragment in her brain: part of the arming mechanism of the Claymore
mine that killed her parents, balanced too deeply, too precariously within her
skull, to ever be removed . . . And from it, and from her other wounds, there
now emerged, accompanied by the patient and regular clicking of her mouse, the
footage . . . Only the wound, speaking wordlessly in the dark.
(Gibson, Pattern Recognition: 305)

In many ways, all this is so clear it requires little commentary and might almost have
been written to illustrate cultural theories of trauma. There is perhaps some
convergence between Nora’s footage – released online in tantalizing fragments – and
Roland Barthes’s concept of the photographic punctum, the ‘tiny shock’ and the
‘element that rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’

European Journal of English Studies Vol. 14, No. 1, April 2010, pp. 1–9
ISSN 1382-5577 print/ISSN 1744-4243 online ª 2010 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13825571003588304
2 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

(Barthes, 2000: 26). Similarly, the ‘trauma art’ of Alberto Corales and Nora that can
be seen anywhere and ‘everywhere’ is a powerful image of the way trauma, once
released into the world, seems to have no clear source and no clear object. At the
same time, the multiple frames of reference in Spook Country and Pattern Recognition –
celebrity, hypermedia, international crime, global marketing, the international art
market, recent history, Internet film clips – seem to demonstrate Roger Luckhurst’s
definition of trauma as ‘a complex knot that binds together multiple strands of
knowledge’ (Luckhurst, 2008: 214).
Two other things can be said about Nora’s ‘footage’. First, the impetus for its
production and Cayce Pollard’s instinctive response to it because of her own 9/11 loss
converge with an observation by Wendy Brown that contemporary identity seems to
be increasingly organized around ‘insistently unredeemable injury’ (see Luckhurst
2003: 47). Second, Cayce Pollard belongs to an online community who follow ‘the
footage’: ‘twenty regular posters . . . and some much larger and uncounted number of
lurkers’ (Gibson, 2004: 4) This sounds very like one of the ‘partial and disturbed
communalities’ that Roger Luckhurst has identified as developing post-9/11
(Luckhurst, 2003: 47). The communalities that Luckhurst identifies could be said to
be founded on the idea of endurance. As David Kennedy has argued (2007: 139), in the
post-9/11 world it is our collective inability to cope that, paradoxically, makes us
better, stronger and more cohesive individuals and nations. We are all survivors now,
so to speak and, of course, the concepts of survival, abuse and trauma are deeply entangled
with each other. At the same time, as Luckhurst’s reference to the World Trade Center
attacks suggests, the idea of repeatability is crucial to the articulation of subjectivity and
communality founded on irredeemable trauma. The recurrence of images of the Twin
Towers falling, of the ‘falling man’, or of Princess Diana’s mangled car in the underpass
that cause both individuals and nations to invest their identities in an ongoing state of being
unable to cope.
Trauma, then, is all around us. In the UK recently, BBC television coverage of
the 2009 London Marathon even turned a sporting event into a site of trauma through
interviews with runners – celebrities and ordinary people – who were all running to
commemorate friends or loved ones lost to various illnesses. But a conception of
history as either ‘internalized trauma’ or the speech of wounds, both of which can be
endlessly reproduced, has serious implications for the processes of remembrance and
commemoration. Indeed, what William Gibson’s two most recent novels seem partly
to register is that new types of social interaction dependent on new modes of
transmitting and receiving information about the self and others may in fact be
working to erode the assumption that individual memory and history are coextensive.
Peter Middleton (2003: 57) has asked whether memory can any longer be viewed as a
matter of ‘historical relation’ any longer. He proposes a new model of memory that
sounds very like Roger Luckhurst’s description of trauma as ‘a complex knot’ and
which is worth quoting at length:

Memory might be better thought of as the work of a network of cultural practices

in history than as a set of material entities or singular acts of consciousness and the
unconscious . . . During the past decade [the 1990s] the rapid growth of interest
in suppressed histories of oppressed, colonised, marginalised and annihilated
peoples led to a new method of cultural and literary study that could be called the
 THE USES OF THE PAST IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EUROPE 3

New Memoryism. Recovered histories and histories of collective self-

representation make ethical, political demands which must recognise the
temporalities at work, of recovery, of atonement, of trauma, of disavowal, of
legacy.
(Middleton, 2003: 58)

New models of remembrance that try to take account of trauma can also be
detected in ongoing debates about appropriate memorials for events such as 9/11.
There is now a so-called ‘anti-monument’ movement which seeks to counter ideas
of official sites of memory with, for example, unrehearsed gatherings that, in Geoff
Carr’s words (2003: 36), suggest ‘an intuitive inclination towards a lived practice of
remembrance’. Carr (43) goes on to detail three important characteristics of anti-
monuments: they seek to return memory to the practice of everyday life by
creating an ‘environment of memory’; they welcome the uncertainty involved in
individuals sharing in the creation and preservation of memory; and they favour
vernacular expressions over official rhetoric. The Mexican-born artist Rafael Lozano
Hemmer produces works of what he calls ‘relational architecture’, which are closely
allied with anti-monuments. In an interview given to Alex Adriaansens and Joke
Brower he argues that:

A monument is something that represents power, or selects a piece of history and

tries to materialize it, visualize it, represent it, always from the point of view of
the elite . . . The anti-monument for me is an alternative to the fetish of the site,
the fetish of the representation of power.
(Adriaansens and Brower, 2003)

What we have sketched – from the novels of William Gibson to the relational anti-
monuments of Rafael Lozano Hemmer – is an immediately recognizable cultural
landscape that is dominated by an increasing blurring of and convergence between ideas
about history, collective memory and trauma. Such blurring and convergence mount
significant challenges to modes of representation because they have the effect of
destabilizing cherished and deep-seated antitheses in Western culture such as
exteriority/interiority, national/personal and public/private. For example, Hemmer’s
anti-monuments articulate an increasing scepticism about ‘official’ remembrance which
is so often closely allied with ideas of nation and yet the example of 9/11 shows how
deeply rooted trauma now is in national identity. And this connects with the two
examples from William Gibson where public and national events become internalized
spaces within individuals. This challenges modes of representation because the modern
period has been dominated by the model of commemoration and memory that is
exemplified by the ‘Epilogue’ to Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Here, the feelings for
Hallam the poem commemorates become something like a talismanic memorial that
we might imagine standing in a city square or park: ‘like a statue solid set, / And
moulded in colossal calm’ (Tennyson, 2003: 220). ‘Calm’ is the key word here: a
statue is an idealized and settled representation, emphatically not the circulation of
ambivalent or untransacted desires. Indeed, in the context of the cultural landscape we
have sketched, Tennyson’s figure of the statue powerfully suggests that desires can only
be made public because they are fully transacted and settled.
4 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

In contrast, if we accept that we are living through a post-traumatic moment,

then trauma is, we might say, the history that keeps on happening. This begs the
double question of whether it is possible to get beyond trauma and of what remains if
we do. In his fascinating survey The Trauma Question (2008) Roger Luckhurst points to
two gestures which seem most characteristic of the cultural representations of post-
traumatic experience. One has to do with what Luckhurst called the ‘trauma
paradigm’ (2008: 1): ‘the genres and narrative forms in which traumatic disruption is
temporalized and rendered transmissible’ (80). The other one is its negative – the
assumption that such a transmission is impossible and indeed not allowed as the
traumatic experience freezes time and any possibility of narrative. Luckhurst draws on
Jean-Francois Lyotard’s post-Kantian analyses of the sublime to emphasize the
aporetic nature of the traumatic experience: ‘[t]rauma can . . . only be an aporia in
narrative’ and ‘can only be conveyed by the catastrophic rupture of narrative
possibility’ (81).
Both gestures are problematic. The contention that the experience of trauma
cannot be expressed or mediated, and should remain, in the words of Wallace
Stevens’s ‘Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight’, ‘beyond the rhetorician’s touch’ (Stevens:
1997: 430) is dangerously close to the policy of silence and unwillingness to address
painful experiences. A good example of this is to be found in the attitudes of Polish
culture and society towards the Holocaust. One of the most typical reactions is an
apparent aversion to any discussion of the issue. This is not a denial of the monstrous
nature of the Holocaust but, rather, a kind of resistance to any critical debate and a
frequently voiced supposition that the traumatic experience cannot be critically
addressed. Both the supposition and the resistance condition each other, leaving an
impression that there is much cultural work to do not so much with the postulate of
aporia but with justifying the silence. A typical example would involve reactions to
two shocking documentary records published by Jan Tomasz Gross: Neighbors: The
Destruction of Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001) and Fear – Anti-Semitism in
Poland After Auschwitz (2006, published in Poland in 2008). It should be said that
Gross’s books met with highly critical responses from some eminent Polish historians.
Their dominant tone, however, was based on the assumption that the truth is too
complex to be narrated historically or critically. The other notion has its obvious
limits. As Luckhurst shows in his book, the narratives dealing with traumatic
experiences hardly escape their own rhetoric and sooner or later get disarmed by their
own conventions. Again, the experience of the Holocaust seems exemplary as many
autobiographical and diaristic accounts published in recent years reproduce the well-
established conventions of the survival narrative. This often has the effect of
neutralizing the shock that the survivor tries to depict and leaves the reader with a
sense of yet another conventional autobiography and not a liminal experience which
‘freezes time’.
In ‘Beyond Trauma: Torturous Times’, Luckhurst’s contribution to this issue of
EJES and a very interesting re-examination of The Trauma Question, the premise of the
aporetic nature of traumatic memory is dismissed as ‘[p]iety . . . about aesthetic
representation’ (19). Luckhurst concludes: ‘I would rather move beyond that, and
follow the extraordinary flowering of cultural work that is using every register to
assess these torturous times’ (19). The last words in the sentence point to an added
poignancy of the representations of scenes of torture. Indeed, Luckhurst admits that
 THE USES OF THE PAST IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EUROPE 5

The Trauma Question was written ‘in an era saturated with the question of torture’
(13), the 2004 Abu Ghraib photographs being his main case and argument. It is not
only that recent representations of torture (photography, cinema, television dramas,
literature) speak against an aesthetic of unspeakability. More importantly, torture
scenes disrupt what Luckhurst calls ‘generic orders of representation’ (19), and do so
by returning to the physiological locus of trauma: the body.
Cultural and documentary representations of torture (for example, Internet film
clips) are violent and very often uncensored records of bodily pain, and as such they
exceed the notion of trauma. This would be their negative potential. But they also
provide us with narratives and gestures that may help us return to the very traumatic
experience and handle it in a new and different manner, not so much by way of
melancholy and/or mourning, but by way of coming back to the bodily dimension of
the traumatic experience so that the latter is re-experienced, remediated and possibly
revoked. It seems that one can find a way out of the deadlock described in ‘Torturous
Times’ by returning to the narrative of the exceptionality of one’s body and one’s
suffering. One characteristic of the experience of singularity is that it cannot be
repeated and thus mediated – still, it lends itself to a narrative. There is nothing more
singular and unique than a sense of one’s own body; its exceptionality resists any kind
of mimetic representation but also invites a story to be told.
At the very end of his article ‘Archive Fever’, Jacques Derrida (1995) refers to
Freud’s ‘Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva’ (1907), a study devoted to Wilhelm
Jensen’s novel about one Norbert Hanhold (archaeologist) who is obsessed with a
bas-relief showing a woman of Pompeii. Hanhold has a dream in which he is
transported to Pompeii in 79 AD and is about to meet Gradiva. He imagines her
walking across the streets of the city which is slowly subsumed by the hot ashes of
Vesuvius. Thus, he is determined to re-experience her traumatic experience and to
revive the singularity of the moment and of Gradiva’s steps. Hanhold evidently tries
to undo the experience of trauma. Derrida comments that here:

is a point which is never taken into account, neither in Jensen’s reading nor in
Freud’s, and this point confounds more than it distinguishes: Hanhold has come
to search for these traces in the literal sense. He dreams of bringing back to life.
He dreams rather of reliving . . . Of reliving the singular pressure or impression
which Gradiva’s step, the step itself, the step of Gradiva herself, that very day, at
that time, on that date, in what was inimitable about it, must have left in the
ashes.
(Derrida, 1995: 61)

Hanhold’s dream-search is futile – everything is burning, and then disappears

‘without remains and without knowledge . . . without a name, without the least
symptom, and without even an ash’ (63).
What is important, though, is a suggestion that the memory of trauma does not
have to be captivating. Luckhurst quotes Ross Chambers who defines aftermath
cultures as ‘melancholic in character; in them mourning can never really be complete
for the reason that trauma . . . is never over’ (19). Now, Hanhold tries to overcome the
melancholy inherent in traumatic experience by identifying with the body about to
suffer, precisely at the moment and the place which would prove traumatic to it.
6 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

Obviously, he cannot repeat the singularity of the event. His dream vanishes into thin
air. However, the story has been told; the moment of trauma has been relived; and,
frankly speaking, nothing disappeared.
In the introduction to his The Not Dead (2008), a collection of nine poems written
for Brian Hill’s Channel 4 film of the same title (broadcast on Remembrance Sunday,
2007), Simon Armitage explains that both the book and the film are about soldiers
returning from wars: ‘Cliff was a veteran of the Malaya Emergency, Eddie served in
Bosnia and Rob fought in Basra’ (Armitage, 2008: xi). He adds: ‘they all suffered
from what has come to be known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder . . . For some of
the men, being in the film meant re-living their worst nightmares; most of the poems
I wrote revolved around a key ‘‘flashback’’ scene, requiring each soldier to re-visit the
very incident he was desperately hoping to forget’ (xi). Armitage also notes that
conventional psychological help ‘has proved largely ineffective with PTSD’ (xi) and
concludes that the soldiers have had no alternative but to keep on living with their
traumatic memories and trying to learn to live with them.
All of the poems are interesting in the light of the ‘beyond trauma’ discussion.
However, I would like to concentrate on ‘The Manhunt,’ a monologue by Laura,
Eddie’s wife. Like Jensen’s Hanhold, Laura can only try and identify with the injured
person – both are, we might say, outsiders who come to see the scene of someone
else’s past suffering. Armitage summarizes his poem in one neat sentence: ‘tracing the
scar of a bullet that took away part of her husband’s face before pin-balling through his
body, [Laura] describes the slow and painful process of trying to reach him, touch
him, love him, and make him human again’ (xiii). The closing lines of the poem are
particularly relevant to our discussion here. After touching his face, shoulder bones
and ribs, Laura says:

Then I widened the search,

traced the scarring back to its source
to a sweating, unexploded mine
buried deep in his mind, around which
every nerve in his body had tightened and closed.
Then, and only then, did I come close.
(Armitage, 2008: n.p.)

The organization of sounds and rhymes seem to mirror the impossible quest for an
accurate representation of trauma: ‘search’ goes to ‘source’, ‘mine’ rhymes with ‘mind’
and ‘closed’ is countered off by ‘close’. Similarly, the widened search for a single point of
origin finds that point dispersed into ‘every nerve’. The slow process of ‘scarring back’
resembles Hanhold’s efforts to grasp the very moment of trauma, its punctum (to use the
Barthesian term) which would subvert the memory and its mechanisms. The
‘unexploded mine’ hidden in Eddie’s mind is puzzlingly reminiscent of images
suggested by Abraham and Torok in their The Shell and The Kernel, but it also resembles a
darkroom where negatives are developed into photographs. It is significant that both
Gradiva and Eddie are silent. The traumatic experience cannot be communicated but, as
we can see, it can be revisited by others and thus saved as narratives.
In answer to our question, this is what may remain after trauma: not a collective
monument or grand narrative but a revisiting and a sharing of the injuries, in
 THE USES OF THE PAST IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EUROPE 7

themselves a silent narrative about the experience of trauma. This would indeed imply
a ‘new model of memory’, the one which does not turn traumatic memories into
monuments but relives them independently of the cultural and literary representa-
tions, constituting its own narrative of the singular and the unmediated, the revolted
and the subverted (‘scarring back’). It does not mean opposing literature (or culture
in general) and moving towards imaginary relationships between the dead and the not
dead, the victims and the survivors, the spectres and the living. On the contrary, it is
a call for new modes of cultural representations which would give justice to the
‘torturous times’ we live in. That such modes are necessary is evident in most of the
contributions to this issue of the EJES. Written from various perspectives, they still
share a common concern: that the collective memory as expressed in official forms is
not enough, and that we have to ‘scar back’ to the source of the injury, perhaps even
identify the source in ourselves. But this gesture should be interpreted more as an act
of resistance to the conventional patterns of memory-ossification than an act of
conformity to the stories of trauma. After all, it is a ‘beyond’ we are seeking.
Working out effective models of memory, narrative transmission and cultural
representation is still a challenge we have to respond to.
It is this challenge and how to respond to it that reverberates throughout the
essays that follow and haunts the places and the moments revisited by their authors.
What is most striking about the essays here – and, indeed, about many other excellent
responses to our call for papers that we did not have space to consider – is the sense
they give that current debates about cultural memory speak to two interrelated sets of
concerns. The first of these is simply: what has been done to bodies in particular
places and historical moments and how this is to be represented and commemorated.
The second is a complex knot of questions about the nature of the archive itself.
‘Forgetting to Heal: Remembering the Abolition Act of 1807’, by Emma Waterton,
Laurajane Smith, Ross Wilson and Kalliopi Fouseki examine the extent to which the
official rhetoric of commemoration employed during the Wilberforce celebrations of
2007 in the UK actually worked against an understanding that the slave trade of
the past had produced the racial conflicts of the present. The implication is that the
ongoing consequences of a negative history urgently need to be imagined despite the
pain attendant on that imagining. Questions of what can be imagined are also crucial
to Esther Sánchez-Pardo’s thoughtful account of the work of Charlotte Delbo and
Jorge Semprun. The work of both writers seeks new ways of synthesizing the horrific
experience of the concentration camps, the unimaginable pain of remembering such
experience and the pleasures of literary representation.
The remaining three essays try to answer the question of what happens when the
site and/or the means of remembrance have themselves been traumatized. Barry
Sloan examines Lost Lives, a monumental ‘inventory’ of all those killed in the Northern
Irish ‘Troubles’ which carefully avoids any wording or terminology with ‘partisan
associations’. The uniqueness of Lost Lives highlights the extent to which
commemoration is often a contest between what Sloan calls ‘the urgency and
importance of inclusive and morally informed remembrance’ (60), and distorted and
distorting rhetorics. Sanja Bahun uses Bahktin’s concept of the chronotope to explore
how Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić figure a place and a time that no longer
exist: life in the former Yugoslavia. Finally, Marija Cetinić uses the burning of the
National and University Library in Sarajevo in 1992 to ask what happens to reading
8 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES

and remembrance in a context dominated by remainder and dispersal. She also

discusses a novel by Dubravka Ugrešić, as well as David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s
Mistress, to suggest a circulatory model of text and memory in which the demands of
affective relations and hermeneutics can have equal weight. And this seems to us to be
the urgent challenge facing both the writer who seeks to represent trauma and the
literary critic who seeks to contextualize and theorize that representation. It is a
challenge that derives from a sense of history that all the essays here share: history as a
process of making and unmaking that involves the traumatic lives of others.

References
Adriaansens, Alex and Brower, Joke (2003). ‘Interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.’ http://
lozano-hemmer.com/english/texts.htm.
Armitage, Simon (2008). The Not Dead. Hebden Bridge: Pomona.
Barthes, Roland (2000). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage.
Carr, Geoff (2003). ‘After Ground Zero: Problems of Memory and Memorialisation.’
Illumine 2.1: 36–44.
Derrida, Jacques (1995). ‘Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression.’ Diacritics Vol. 25,
No. 2: 9–63.
Gibson, William (2004). Pattern Recognition. London: Penguin.
Gibson, William (2008). Spook Country. New York: Berkley.
Kennedy, David (2007). Elegy. London: Routledge.
Luckhurst, Roger (2003). ‘Traumaculture.’ New Formations 50: 28–47.
Luckhurst, Roger (2008). The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge.
Middleton, Peter (2003). ‘The New Memoryism: How Computers Changed the Way We
Read.’ New Formations 50: 57–74.
Stevens, Wallace (1997). Collected Poetry and Prose. Eds Frank Kermode and Joan
Richardson. New York: Library of America.
Tennyson, Lord Alfred (2003). Selected Poems. London: Penguin.

Jacek Gutorow (b. 1970) is Assistant Professor at the University of Opole, Poland. His
research interests include the role and status of literary criticism in the contemporary
world and the interdependencies of literature and philosophy. He has published
translations of and commentaries on such figures as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hans-Georg
Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. He has also published widely on British poetry and 20th-
century American literature and is particularly interested in the reception of British and
American literary studies in Poland. He has published three books of criticism in Polish:
The Ends of Man: Six Essays on Deconstruction (2001), Independence of Voice: Notes on
Polish Poetry after 1968 (2003), and The Lost Track (2007) about the condition of avant-
garde poetry in Poland. He has also published four collections of poetry and numerous
translations from British and American literature (including Henry James, Wallace
Stevens and John Ashbery). His critical study, Luminous Traversing: Wallace Stevens and
the American Sublime was published in 2007. A group of essays on autobiographical and
dialogical motifs in Derrida’s last texts is forthcoming in the journal Odra.
 THE USES OF THE PAST IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY EUROPE 9

Address: Uniwersytet Opole, Institute of English Philology, plac Kopernika 11, 45-040
Opole, Poland. [email: jacek.gutorow@neostrada.pl]

Jerzy Jarniewicz is a Polish poet, translator and literary critic. He is Professor of

English Literature at the universities of Łódź and Warsaw; and is editor of the literary
monthly Literatura na Swiecie. He has translated the work of many poets and novelists,
including James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, Philip Roth and Edmund White. He has written
extensively on contemporary poetry for various journals including Poetry Review, Irish
Review, Cambridge Review, and European Journal of English Studies. His critical books
include The Uses of the Commonplace in Contemporary British Poetry (1994); The
Bottomless Centre: The Uses of History in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (2003); and Larkin
(2006). In 2003, he organized ‘Cultural Identities’, a symposium on contemporary British
and Irish poetry at the University of Łódź, with the financial support of the British
Council. He is the author of eight collections of poetry. His poetry has been translated
into many languages and published in many international magazines and in The
Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry (1999). Address: Instytut Anglistyki,
Uniwersytet Lodzki, Kosciuszki 65, 90–514 Lodz, Poland. [email: jjarniew@uni.lodz.pl]

David Kennedy is Senior Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of
Hull, UK. His research interests range across contemporary British and Irish poetry,
elegy and theories of mourning, literary masculinities, writing pedagogy and
experimental literature. He is the author of Douglas Dunn (Writers and Their Work,
2008) and Elegy (Routledge New Critical Idiom, 2007) which includes extensive
discussion of cultural memory and the changing nature of the public and private
spheres post-9/11 and 7/7. He is the editor of Necessary Steps: Poetry, Walking, Elegy,
Spirit (Shearsman, 2007). He publishes widely on contemporary British and Irish poetry,
including articles in Irish Studies Review, English, the Journal of British and Irish
Innovative Poetry, Mortality and Textual Practice. Address: Department of English,
University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull HU6 7RX, UK. [email: D.Kennedy@hull.ac.uk]