Stef Craps
The Instance of Trauma. Ed. Ortwin de Graef, Vivian Liska, and Katrien Vloeberghs. Spec. issue of EJES: European Journal of English Studies 7.3 (2003): 293-309.
Publication year: 2003

Graham Swift’s writing space may be described as the liminal zone between modernity, with its now-discredited grand narratives, and a tentative and tantalizing postmodernity, to be created out of the debris of the past. Out of this World, Swift’s fourth novel, reflects on the part (to be) played by photographic and textual representation in mediating this critical transition. The aim of this article is to analyse this mediating process and to assess its ethical import at this particular historical juncture. It argues that the novel reveals the widely-held belief in the demystifying function of both photography and fiction to be complicitous with a dubious evasion of ethical responsibility, and that it puts forward the arduous and painful process of working through a traumatic reality as a precondition for the creation of a future which would be truly otherwise, not a stale repetition of the past but something radically new and as yet unimaginable.