Abstract
<jats:p>Emotions and their powers have for a long time been an object of study, but the course of the research has been determined by the radical decision to either locate emotion in discourse or to overemphasize their psychological concern. According to Renate Lachmann, the mnemonic capacities of literature include the representation and transmission of knowledge. The traumas of love and war are best situated in language and perhaps best expressed in words: despite its numerous deficiencies, the language is the only medium capable of collecting valuable meanings and the ultimate essence which incorporates pain and unhappiness, physical and emotional devastation, the brutal effects of violence on survivors, or the rise of brutality and confrontation with the imminent trauma as a lasting consequence which affects the individual characters. The novels by Amber Tamblyn, Toni Morrison, Ottessa Moshfegh, Tanja Stupar Trifunović and Ana Vučković, deal with a broad scope of strategies of coping with memory, violence, oblivion and trauma amid social forces that are impossible to suppress or to control. The fiction by these women authors offers a glimpse into the contemporary world, focusing mostly on the survivors who reexperience the retroactive horror and struggle to come to terms with the society’s collective memory and their own respective powers of survival. The narratives demonstrate that the distinction between the world of memory and the real world narrows, as the literary transformation of experience has to cope with antagonistic and ambivalent attitudes towards the tradition and the cultural practices of reality.</jats:p>