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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
