Poetic witnessing in the archive: The database narrative of life after wartime

In this paper I analyse the textual strategies employed in Ross Gibson and Kate Richards's interactive database narrative project Life after Wartime (2002), which I argue generates a form of narrative that embodies a 'poetics of haunting'. Shifting juxtapositions of image and text, archive and fiction within Life after Wartime serve to foreground the ambiguities within testimony and to set in motion the connections we make with the past. I explore whether Life after Wartime may be productively viewed as a distinctive new media model of a 'trauma text', one eschewing notions of narrative or therapeutic closure, in which complex interconnections between memory, history and fantasy are played out.