War Neurosis, Trauma, and Violence in Interwar European Literature

Wednesday, Mar 11, 2026 | 5:00pm – 6:00pm EDT | Old North 205
In this talk, Dr. Stefano Serafini (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown Humanities Initiative, Universität Hamburg, and Università di Padova) investigates how interwar European literature grappled with the pervasive, yet often repressed, impact of war trauma through a comparative analysis of Giovanni Comisso’s Il delitto di Fausto Diamante (Italy, written in 1926 but published in 1933), Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Britain, 1928), and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (Germany, 1929).