Female Dimension of Traumatic Experience in Kateryna Kalytko’s Poetry

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.28925/2412-2475.2025.25.7

Keywords:

gender, female experience, history, borderlinesness, mythopoetics, memory, trauma

Abstract

Trauma issues research in fiction is one of the most relevant problems that is provoked not only by the challenges of wartime but also still does by social and cultural transformations in Ukrainian society. One of these aspects is expressing the readiness to discuss publically revealing the vexed issues. One of them is the issue of female traumatic experience, the level of its representation directly depends on specialties of society organizing, which still be structured according to patriarchal values statements. Spite on literature`s capability to be not only a projection but also to catalyze the social and cultural process, we consider it necessary to analyse of Kateryna Kalytko`s poetry collections “The Order of the Silent Women” and “Nobody Knows Us Here, and We Don’t Know Anyone” because in these works are revealed sufficiently the problems of post-colonial heritage and gender inequality which still exists in a demonstratively democratic society. The relevance of the paper is provoked by needing to reveal the trauma problems from the female perspective in Kateryna Kalytko`s poetry as an opposition to the patriarchal gaze which belongs to the biases and blaming regarding the female survivor, which meanwhile justifies the thief. Similar practices of dual standards, female conviction and female blaming reflect enough clearly the colonial imperial practices of enslaving, destructing the identity, and taking back the opportunity to talk and to evidence itself. The subjects of our study are poetical strategies of female trauma experience elucidating in Kateryna Kalytko`s poetry. The methodology of research contains of comprehensive combination of gender, existential, and feministic critics, of anticolonial, trauma and memory studies, of mythopoetic analysis and archetype critics, of hermeneutic approach and receptive aesthetics. The prime results of the paper are that was analyzed the imaginal, symbolical, locative, and semantical components of Kateryna Kalytko`s poetry, and was accented on prominent motifs and ideas, it represented the interpretation of characters` images according to the semantical contents of poetries. This paper completes other research which were regarding outlining poetical aspects of the female experience in Kateryna Kalytko`s heritage. The newness of the research is that the methodology of gender, existential, anticolonial, mythopoetic, and archetypical critics were combined for the first time which allows us to retrace the specifics of trauma and memory motifs realization. Also in research, the results of medicine and psychotherapy spheres were implicated. In the paper, the optics of literary, psychotherapeutic, and sociological disciplines, of structural psychoanalysis and neuroscience were combined, and own approach to artistic text interpretation was proposed. The perspectives of further investigation are seen in the exploration of trauma and memory themes in prose and translation of Kateryna Kalytko`s heritage, and also it relies on deeper research of national memory and history themes in the author`s poetry.

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Published

30.06.2025

How to Cite

Ovsianytska, H. (2025). Female Dimension of Traumatic Experience in Kateryna Kalytko’s Poetry. LITERARY PROCESS: Methodology, Names, Trends, (25), 74–91. https://doi.org/10.28925/2412-2475.2025.25.7

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The conceptual issues of literary studies