"It Ain't Easy to Forget" - Trauma and Memory in Shirley Ann Grau's "Homecoming"

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Vienna, language: English, abstract: "Through sheer numbers, women writers have dominated the contemporary literary scene in the South - that is, since World War II" (Bennett 987). Among them is the talented Pulitzer Prize winner Shirley Ann Grau, who sheds a fresh, new light to common southern themes incorporating them into narratives touched not only by her personal perspective, but also the collective southern heritage and consciousness. The subject matter of my paper will be one of Grau's short stories entitled "Homecoming". In this short, yet meaningful account of everyday life in the American South during the Vietnam War Grau unearths a string of relations between life and death, the present and the past, remembering and forgetting, pride and honor as well as patriotism and egoism. She focuses mainly on what remains, but never forgets to neglect what has gone. The strongly southern theme of nostalgia for the lost past is questioned in "Homecoming" as the protagonist struggles to detach herself from the memory of all those who failed to come home. In this paper I would like to primarily focus on the importance of memory as a factor shaping the southern identity.