Trauma Theory / Trauma Narratives

(MA seminar; Winter and Summer or Winter only)

Professor Deborah Madsen

deborah.madsen@lettres.unige.ch

Mondays 14.15-16.00

COURSE DESCRIPTION

In this seminar we will read texts on the literature of and about trauma and violence, identifying the connections (and disconnections) between theory and practice. We will consider trauma in the context of race, class, and sexuality; the ethics of representing trauma in testimonial literature, autobiography (including false trauma memoirs) and fictional texts; and the capacity of language to articulate the experience of trauma. Topics for discussion include: personal trauma such as rape, incest, relationship violence, and mental illness; as well as historical trauma such as the Holocaust, American slavery, Native American genocide and the Vietnam War. Trauma theory can be situated at the intersection of poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic theoretical approaches. The engagement with this body of theoretical work is an essential dimension of the seminar.

TEXTS

Texts available from Off the Shelf, Payot (Chantepoulet), and the seminar shelf in the English Library.

REQUIREMENTS

1. weekly reading assignments and active participation in discussion

2. regular attendance

3. satisfactory oral presentations

ASSESSMENT

MA1: a written examination (6 hrs) OR an attestation of approximately 10 pages;

MA2: an oral examination (30 mins) OR an attestation of approximately 10 pages;

MA3a and MA3b: a written paper OR written exam.

This seminar is also available under the old plan d’études as AB5, AB6, AB7 or AB8.

DEADLINES

Attestations are due on the following dates:

Monday January 9^th for the February exam session;

Monday May 8^th for the June exam session;

Monday September 10^th for the October exam session.

Attestations submitted after the deadline will be graded for the following session.

NOTE: October 2006 is the latest session for which the Winter seminar is valid; February 2007 is the latest session for which the Summer seminar is valid. All assessed work must be completed by this date. No further work will be accepted after this date.

PRESENTATION OF WRITTEN WORK

All students must read the English Department Style Sheet (available on the departmental website and as a booklet from the English secretariat) and follow the instructions for the formal presentation of written work. Attestations that do not observe the Style Sheet will be returned for correction before they are graded. Note that this may mean that essays returned in this way will miss the deadline for the exam session.

All papers must be submitted in hard copy. Electronic (email) submission of assessed work is not permitted except in extraordinary circumstances and with the prior agreement of the professor.

Attestations should be accompanied by a cover page which includes:

• your name,

• your student number,

• the module number,

• your postal address and

• email address.

Corrected attestations will be returned (in person at the lecture or by post) with a copy of the form sent to the service des examens by the English secretariat.

Students taking both Winter and Summer seminars as module AB7 or AB8 may submit one long paper covering material from both seminars rather than two shorter papers. Topics must include substantive engagement with the theoretical material covered in the seminar ; papers should discuss entire texts and not only excerpts used in seminars. Students are encouraged to submit an outline and bibliography for approval before beginning work on essays.

ATTENDANCE

Students are required to sign the attendance sheet each week. It is the student’s responsibility to ensure that the sheet is signed. Any student who is absent more than three times will not be permitted to submit assessed work for this course. Only certified medical absences will be excused.

SEMINAR SCHEDULE

Winter Semester

31 Oct Introduction

from Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, eds., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992) ; from Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995); from Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience : Trauma, Narrative, History (1996)

PERSONAL TRAUMA

In this first part of the seminar, two novels will form the basis for applying and evaluating our theoretical readings: Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman (1999) and Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (1993). All students must have their own copies of these novels.

7 Nov Testimony, Memory, Survivor Narrative: STUDENT RESPONSE PAPERS

Keller; Jacques Derrida, “On Forgiveness” (2001): seminar shelf; Jeffrey K. Olick (1999), "Collective Memory: The Two Cultures," Sociological Theory, 17. 3 (November), pp. 333-348 JSTOR; Nora Okja Keller, Asianweek, http://www.asianweek.com/2002_04_05/arts_keller.html

14 Nov Trauma Narratives and Mental Illness

Keller; Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914); Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917 [1915]): seminar shelf

21 Nov Trauma Narratives and Mental Illness: Freud and Keller, continued

28 Nov Who tells the Trauma? Witness and Autobiography: STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

Keller; from Sangmie Choi Schellstede, ed., Comfort Women Speak: Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military, (2000): seminar shelf

See this article and responses in Japan Today ‘Art exhibit by wartime sex slaves opens in Tokyo’ : http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=2&id=356306

5 Dec Narrativizing Trauma

Keller; we return to Derrida’s essay, “On Forgiveness” (2001); STUDENT PRESENTATIONS: Keller’s trauma symbolism

12 Dec Trauma and Relationship Violence

Allison; Kali Tal, “We Didn't Know What Would Happen: Opening the Discourse on Sexual Abuse” and “This Is About Power On Every Level: Three Incest Survivor Narratives” in Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1996).

19 Dec Sexual Violence/Incest Narratives: STUDENT PRESENTATIONS

Allison; Wendy S. Hesford, “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation,” College English, 62. 2 (November, 1999), 192-221. JSTOR

9 Jan What is the ‘Experience’ of Trauma?

Allison; Ernst Van Alphen, “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma,” in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (1999), pp. 24-38: seminar shelf

16 Jan The Language of Trauma

Allison, Keller; Peter Ramadanovic, “Introduction: Trauma and Crisis”, and Linda Belau, “Trauma and the Material Signifier,” Postmodern Culture 11. 2 (January 2001), http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.101/11.2contents.html

HISTORICAL TRAUMA

Holocaust Trauma: Narrative and Theory

23 Jan Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments (1997) ; Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1996), Chapter Two: “A Form of Witness: The Holocaust and North American Memory,” http://freshmonsters.com/kalital/Text/Worlds/Chap2.html

30 Jan Wilkomirski; Giorgio Agamben, from Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999) : seminar shelf

6 Feb Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl” (1990): seminar shelf: STUDENT RESPONSE PAPERS

SEMINAR SCHEDULE

Summer Semester

13/3 Reprise of Winter seminar discussions; Dominick LaCapra, from Representing the Holocaust : History, Theory, Trauma (1994)

American Slavery Narratives

20/3 Harriet Jacobs, from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861): http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JACOBS/hj-site-index.htm; Agamben, “The Witness”

27/3 Jacobs;

Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 103-124: seminar shelf

3/4 Jacobs; Octavia Butler, Kindred (1988)

Walter Benn Michaels, “You who never was there? Slavery and the New Historicism, Deconstruction and the Holocaust”, in Hilene Flanzbaum (ed.), The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 181-97: seminar shelf

10/4 Butler;

Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry, 25 (Summer 1999), pp. 696-727: seminar shelf

17/4 EASTER

Vietnam War Narratives

24/4 Michael Herr, Dispatches (1977);

Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1996), Chapter Four: “Between the Lines: Reading the Vietnam War,” http://freshmonsters.com/kalital/Text/Worlds/Chap4.html

1/5 LABOR DAY HOLIDAY

8/5 Herr; Le Ly Hayslip, Child of War, Woman of Peace (1993), Part Three, ‘Taking the Long Road Back.’

15/5 Hayslip;

Marita Sturken, “The Remembering of Forgetting: Recovered Memory and the Question of Experience,” Social Text, 57 (Winter 1998),103-25:

JSTOR

Native American Genocide: Another Holocaust?

22/5 Representations of the Wounded Knee Massacre:

Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), from From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1936), Chapter Seven: “The Ghost Dance War”; Dee Brown, from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971), “Introduction” and Chapter Nineteen, “Wounded Knee”;

STUDENT PRESENTATIONS: American Indian Movement activism

29/5 Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977);

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, from Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays (1996), Chapter One: “Wounded Knee, 1973” AND Chapter Seven, “The Relationship of a Writer to the Past: Art, a Literary Principle, and the Need to Narrate”: seminar shelf.

5/6 PENTECOST

12/6 Silko; Hartwig Isernhagen, “Mourning as a Creative Strategy: The Native American Renaissance and the Reconstruction of Home as a Type of Diaspora,” in Harald Zapf & Klaus Lösch, (ed.), Cultural Encounters in the New World (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 2003), pp. 281-99: seminar shelf.

19/6 Conclusion: Silko; Freud; Derrida; LaCapra.

BACKGROUND READING

PERSONAL TRAUMA

Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1996)

Review : http://www.freshmonsters.com/kalital/Text/Worlds/DeRoseRev.html

Anne Whitehead, Traumatic Fiction (2004)

Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (2001)

Suzette Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (2000)

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (1985)

HOLOCAUST TRAUMA

Stefan Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth (2000)

Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation

(2000)

James E. Young, At Memory's Edge : After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (2000)

James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust : Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Indiana University Press,1990)

Marianne Hirsch, Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust (2004)

Lawrence Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975)

---, The Age of Atrocity : Death in Modern Literature (1978)

---, Admitting the Holocaust : Collected Essays (1995)

VIETNAM WAR TRAUMA

Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, eds. Extremities : Trauma, Testimony, and Community (2002)

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1977)

James Freeman, ed. Hearts of Sorrow : Vietnamese-American Lives (1989)

Jeffrey Walsh, American War Literature: 1914 to Vietnam (1983)

NATIVE AMERICAN TRAUMA

David E. Stannard, Native American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (1993)

Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop (1992)

Paula Gunn Allen, Off the Reservation (1999)