Verbalizing of trauma in literary text

The article is devoted to the issue of public representation of slavery as traumatizing events on the American continent. It considers artistic modes of integrating an extremelyviolent, life-shattering personal experience within a unified collective narrative bibliography to form a collective memoryand articulating discourse surrounding the social tragedy. It focuses on the language means of the inner world of trauma objectivation, “verbalizing of unspeakable” and “making sense of incomprehensible” in the novel by Tony Morrison “Beloved” as an artistic form of remembering culture. The author analyzes examples of metonymic reconstruction of the past, repeated reliving of memories of the traumatic experience, which are accompanied by extreme phycological pain, and are triggered by places and objects, associated with the past. The study of traumatizing collective experience verbalization is especially significant today in the context of persistent and increasingly active political and social US campaigns to revise the national history and change historical memory. This revising process results in increased political tensions within country, splitting society into groups on origin, ethnic, religious or other grounds. It results in the growing gap between countries as well. The representation of the past traumatic events and their consequences in the present is becoming an increasingly noticeable political and cultural transnational project. The most pressing issues such as racism, slavery, genocide, terrorism, the consequences of extreme violence remain at the centre of intense public discussion. The novel, providing the literary schemes of past interpretation and representation plays an important role in reconceptualizing the ethnic identity of Other and promoting sociopolitical interests of ethnic communities.