Syllabus: Trauma Narratives

Freeside Europe Online Academic Journal, 2021

There has been a particular interest in trauma studies since the end of the twentieth century; not just in psychology and psychiatry, the main fields of study concerning mental disorders, but in every aspect of life. Consequently, a growing number of publications have been published that approach trauma from various fields: social and literary studies, comparative literature, philosophy, ethics, etc. At the same time, from talk shows to the news broadcasts, from popular media (post-apocalyptic movies, disaster films, games to art movies), from direct testimonies of survivors to fictive accounts of traumatic experience, there is a proliferation of all kinds of representations of trauma to the extent that testimony has been suggested as “the literary mode […] of our times”, whereas “our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony” (Felman 1995: 17). The question naturally arises whether trauma has become a cliché in contemporary literature and culture, or whether literature h...

Trauma involves a rupture in the temporal and symbolic orders at individual and collective levels. Fictional representation of trauma, therefore, is marked by a problem of referentiality, where mimesis fails and chronology breaks down. The article opens with a discussion on the disorientation in the co-ordinative links between the world, the self, and representational tools in the event of a traumatic experience, which results in the crisis of referentiality. The inadequacy of language as a representational medium on the one hand, and unacknowledgement of extreme events beyond " socially validated reality " on the other, constitute two of the major issues creative artists have to deal with. An extreme event leaves a mnemonic gap in the psyche of the traumatized individual, and the process of recovery involves the gap being filled in with narrative memory, suggesting an epistemological void. Narrative memory acts as the surrogate memory of the traumatic event, which is unavailable to willed recollection. This surrogate memory is compared to Jean Baudrillard's third order of simulation, where a false presence conceals the absence of any basic reality. Recognizing the referential and representational crises at work in rendering traumatic experiences in fiction, the article goes on to explore the ways of bypassing them and discuss the idea of indirect representation in Michael Rothberg's Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Rothberg believes that an oblique rendition of traumatic events in fiction may be an appropriate representational mode within the conflicting demands of the documentation of reality, meditation on the formal limits by the creative artist, and risky circulation of images in the globalized world. This leads to a deliberation on Anne Whitehead and Laurie Vickroy's idea of the emerging genre of " trauma fiction " with its thematic and stylistic concerns. The article ends with a summary of the representational techniques likely to feature in fictions written on violent events.

In literature, all human phenomena are reflected by literary works and related to the world through simple artistic mediums. It is no doubt that trauma exists as part of human challenges since the start of human history. However, the concept of trauma has been theorized in the fields of sciences and social sciences since ages i.e. Medicine, Psychology etc. only soon did it gain credence and was theorized in the stream of literature by some competent, scholarly and capable professors of comparative literature at Emory University; Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman. As the world evolves from one age to another, so does literature, binding history and culture of a place and people efficiently. Trauma has as well been one way or another, prevalent in all forms of literature. It surfaces as the shady part of all narratives that tell of a history, memoir, agonies and sorrows of the writer or about the subjects (characters) created.

Literary trauma studies is a rapidly developing field which examines how literature deals with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such historical and current phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides, 9/11, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments. It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma. Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to fur...

2022

Trauma is often seen as an event that blocks the victim's expressive capacities. It leaves people speechless, manifesting itself in various symptoms and post-traumatic disorders. Yet, it also generates a stream of narratives-textual, visual, or oral. This course explores this dual nature of trauma: trauma as a tool of repression and silencing, and trauma as a prerequisite for a "talking cure." We will see how traumatic events are worked through storytelling-by creating narratives of loss, suffering, and displacement. The course combines two types of texts: 1) key theoretical works on trauma, witnessing, and testimony, and 2) artistic representation of trauma, loss, and grief. Throughout the semester, we will be building close connections between these two types of traumatic representations.

Trauma narratives are “marked by interruptions, temporal disorder, refusal of easy readerly identification, disarming play with narrative framing, disjunct movements in style, tense, focalization or discourse, and a resistance to closure that is demonstrated in compulsive telling and retelling.” The trauma genre is avant-garde, experimental, and fragmented; it refuses the consolations of beautiful form, and is suspicious of conventions. Its resistance to closure can be paired with a view, especially in W. G. Sebald, that trauma is permanent and cannot be healed, but can at best be witnessed. The ways in which trauma simultaneously defies and demands readers’ witness, not a simple knowledge of the event, is what marks it as trauma. Trauma writers such as Sebald and Patrick Modiano interrupt their narratives with excerpts, images, and digressions. They frame their narratives by layering voices, often beyond two degrees of separation from the narrator.

International Journal of English Language Studies

With the rise of psychiatric literature and medical humanities, trauma studies have gained significant focus in recent years. The studies that were done by Kidd (2005), Perring (2013), Olive (2014), Seran (2015), Tembo (2017), Hussain et al. (2018), Finck (2006), Durrant (2012), Long (2012), De Mey (2012), Curtis (2015), Karpasitis (2010), Ward (2008) and Dauksaite (2013), particularly, deal with diverse traumatic experiences. At the same time, they also throw light on the issues of the representation of trauma in narratives. They have examined narrative strategies, like the use of transgenerational empathy, intermediality of text and image, syntax disruption, ellipses, text/image layout, repetitions, symbols, photograph insertion, and assimilation, intertexts, framing of panels, inter-textuality, repetition, fragmentation, and flashback, that can be employed to deal with the challenges for the representation of traumatic experiences in narratives. This paper argues that the narrati...