Date Published:

Abstract:

The trauma of a returning soldier is a topos in war literature. Its exploration frequently relies on the semantic and semiotic negotiations between the war zone and the life back home. Mariette Kalinowski’s short story “The Train” stands out among texts examining the struggles of returnees not only through its authorship — it belongs to the rather limited body of war literature by women veteran writers — but also because of the manner in which it projects the materialization of this exchange. Traumatic visions of a bomb going off in Iraq infiltrate and ultimately take possession of the protagonist’s present-day reality. Homeland is devoid of a sense of belonging, and the material objects that populate it become both the repository and the integrators of the protagonist’s traumatic war experience. By employing trauma theory and thing theory, this paper examines the representation of connections between home and the battlefield and looks into the transformation of objects into things that assist in the pursuit of ontological imperatives. To the vocabulary of trauma studies it adds the notion of nodal integrator in the analysis of Kalinowski’s innovativeness in the handling of the topos.

March 2026: Amelia Precup is a lecturer in the Department of Anglophone and Scandinavian Studies at the Faculty of Letters, Babeș-Bolyai University. She is the author of a monograph entitled ‘The reality I speak of here…’ – A Long Analysis of Woody Allen’s Short Fiction. She has presented papers and published work on contemporary American (war) fiction, representations of gender and ethnicity, and (early) modern English literature. Her current academic interests focus on recent American fiction, especially war literature and narratives about conflict.