Sixteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

The paper challenges reconsideration of the concept of resilience from the diverse cultural perspective and to re-conceptualize it as an important framework applicable in a certain time frame. The focus is on how the community adapted to a different societal environment and how culture became the diversity that created a meaningful life. The experience in political detention is recreated through literary testimonies to illustrate traumatic historical experiences of political conflicts. The paper illustrates how prison memoirs reveal intersecting histories that show possible functions of literary art such as the need of confession, self-knowledge, therapeutic function (healing through writing of prison trauma), but also pedagogical function, with educational and constructive value, when the author intends to transmit to future generations testimonies of the era. Literature is, therefore, cathartic. Thus, literary art is a form of alternative historiography and the recent history should be rediscovered and understood nowadays by the young generation as it is a part of their background.