Author(s)

Wang Jingwen ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210024, China

Corresponding Author

Wang Jingwen

ABSTRACT

Fortune Smiles is a collection of six short stories written by American writer Adam Johnson in 2015. In these narrations, the author blends many cultural factors into the lives of ordinary people, such as high-tech, natural disasters, political conflicts, contradictions of human nature, and ethics. He tries to express the contradictions and complexities of humanity in the vast world, and reveals the global survival crisis. “Trauma” is a prominent theme of the collection, which has become the focus of literary creation and criticism since the 1990s when writers pay more attention to the traumatic experiences and survival situations of ordinary people after experiencing world wars, the threat of nuclear war, the growing violent crimes and natural disasters. From the perspective of trauma, the thesis analyzes the representations, the causes and the healing methods of the trauma in Fortune Smiles by means of intensive reading. In this way, we can highlight people's efforts to restore the confidence and dignity of life, to resolve the pain of reader, and to construct the meaning of life.

KEYWORDS

Fortune smiles, Trauma, The ordinary people, Healing

CITE THIS PAPER

Wang Jingwen. The Trauma of Ordinary People in Fortune Smiles. Advances in Educational Technology and Psychology (2021) 5: 18-23. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/aetp.2021.58005

REFERENCES

[1] Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History [M]. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
[2] Charles, R. 2016. Fortune Smiles Review: Masterful Stories from a 2013 Pulitzer Winner [N].  The Washington Post 2016-4-12.
[3] Dan, H. 2011. Two Narrative Dimensions in ‘9/11’ Novels: Falling Man and Let the Great  World Spin [A].  Contemporary Foreign Literature 2 (2011): 66 –73.
[4] Dominick, L. 2001.  Writing History, Writing Trauma [M]. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins  University Press.
[5] Herman, J. 1997.  Trauma and Recovery [M].  New York: Basic Books.
[6] Johnson, A. 2015.  Fortune Smiles [M].  New York: Random House.
[7] Kakutani, M. 2015.  Stories from Dark Places [N].  New York Times 2015-11-2.
[8] Kelly, G. 2015. Pulitzer-Winner Adam Johnson Delivers Tales of Trauma and Redemption  [N].  The New Republic 2015-12-20.
[9] Milan, K. 1980.  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [M].  New York: Knopf.
[10] Sigmund, F. 1964.  Moses and Monotheism [M].  London: The Hogarth Press.

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