Download or read book Collective Trauma and Its Narrative Techniques. Julie Otsuka’s "When the Emperor Was Divine" and "The Buddha in the Attic" written by Marnie Hensler and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2.0, University of Freiburg (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: Julie Otsuka novels "When the Emperor was Divine"(2002) and "The Buddha in the Attic" (2011) narrate the collective trauma experienced by Japanese immigrants in America during the Second World War. With the help of different narrative techniques, both novels communicate the collective trauma to the contemporary reader. This paper analyses the different narrative strategies and their effects on the Western reader in greater detail through traditional close reading strategies. While "When the Emperor was Divine" narrates the collective trauma through alternating, individual perspectives of a representative Japanese family, "The Buddha in the Attic" manages to create a more powerful communal voice with its consistent first-person plural narration.