Degree

BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)

Faculty / School

School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)

Department

Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts

Date of Award

Spring 2025

Date of Submission

2025-07-30

Advisor

Palvashay Sethi

Project Type

SSLA Culminating Experience

Access Type

Restricted Access

Keywords

The Setting Sun, A Promised Land, Collective Trauma, Cultural Trauma, Postwar Japan, Post-Partition India

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative analysis of Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun and Khadija Mastur’s A Promised Land. It examines how each novel portrays collective, cultural, and psychological traumas experienced by the society as a collective in post-war Japan and post-Partition South Asia. This thesis draws from trauma theories of Gilad Hirschberger’s “Collective Trauma”, Judith Herman’s “Psychological Trauma”, and Jeffrey C. Alexander’s “Cultural Trauma” to study how each novel makes sense of the disruptions caused by historical disaster. Its focus is on the crisis of meaning that emerges when established social orders collapse and how that influences identity. Close readings of both texts reveal that trauma experienced can manifest in melancholic introspection and the silent endurance of daily life. The research found that both novels resist neat trauma recovery arcs and portray trauma as a quiet and ongoing presence. For Dazai, trauma surfaces through existential despair and the erosion of inherited structures. For Mastur, it appears in muted endurance and the burden of unspoken loss. While the characters take different paths, they share a common struggle to remake meaning in the absence of coherent frameworks. This study concludes that literature creates a space where histories of pain that are often overlooked by official accounts, can be remembered. It becomes a medium through which trauma is made visible. This thesis argues that each novel’s literary representations fill in the gaps left by official histories which offer a look into the ways literature preserves memory, and bears witness to the ongoing negotiation of meaning after collective disaster by bringing Japanese and South Asian trauma narratives into dialogue.

Pages

XLVIII,48

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