Liisa
Merivuori
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Biography
I am a doctoral researcher at the department of Comparative Literature, University of Turku. Along with my doctoral studies I have worked as the coordinator of Research Centre SELMA and periodically as a part-time university teacher in literature studies.
I graduated as Master of Arts in June 2021. My master’s thesis focused on trauma and narrative identity in German-Romanian author Herta Müller’s novel Atemschaukel. My minors included gender studies, creative writing, Finnish language, and pedagogical studies. I have the qualifications to work as a teacher of Finnish as first and second language. After graduating I worked as a language teacher in Finnish integration training for adult immigrants until starting my doctoral studies full-time in January 2023.
My research interests include trauma fiction, minority narratives, feminist literature studies, intersectionality, and narrative hermeneutics. In my doctoral dissertation I analyse contemporary trauma fiction from a critical perspective that emphasises the ethical and political potential of literature. My research material includes four novels published in 2009-2022.
Research
In my doctoral dissertation I study how different types of trauma are described in modern literature and how trauma fiction can help us readers understand the private and cultural traumas of our own reality. I focus on how several traumas that intersect with each other affect the characters, and especially their narrative identities, in my subject novels. The novels I study include Atemschaukel (The Hunger Angel) by Herta Müller, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and Hävitys. Tapauskertomus (“Destruction. A case study”) by Iida Rauma.
My goal is to join together intersectional trauma studies and narrative hermeneutics, and thereby create a strong theoretical background through which it is possible to inspect trauma as a part of both a novel as a whole and of a character inside a work of fiction. Combining two separate fields of study allows me to bring forth new sides of both those theoretical fields and also the novels I study through them. My dissertation will add into the field of literary trauma studies a more intersectional way to read trauma fiction and analyze the effects trauma has on narrative identity.
My doctoral research is funded by Kone Foundation.