Browsing by Subject "Psychic trauma in literature"
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Item Ordinary witnesses(2003) Harad, Alyssa D.; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-“Ordinary Witnesses” takes up and extends Toni Morrison’s call to recognize the unspoken, but “seething presence” of America’s historical traumas in some of the American canon’s most venerated works. Beyond its explorations of trauma in three deeply resonant works of contemporary American literature, it shows how trauma provides a critical lens through which we may begin to read and teach across the multiple literatures of the United States without collapsing their specific histories. Rather than simply “applying” trauma theory to literature, “Ordinary Witnesses” makes explicit the rich implicit work on American trauma already present in its literature. In doing so, this project reframes debates about the practice of canonization. For example, while its primary texts might normally be read within separate canons of Native American literature, African American literature, Southern literature, or lesbian literature, here they are complimentary pieces of an ongoing national debate about the nature of America’s story, a debate that is deeply inflected by trauma’s long term effects. Chapter One traces Dorothy Allison’s strategies, as reflected in Bastard Out of Carolina, for rewriting a contemporary political narrative of child abuse that relegates class oppression to the background. Chapter Two examines how Sherman Alexie’s novels and short stories, particularly Reservation Blues, intervene in a genocidal myth of the disappearing Indian that makes its survivors invisible. Chapter Three explores why, in The Alchemy of Race and Rights, legal scholar Patricia Williams turns to literary strategies to show the everyday effects of a social contract based on slavery. The fourth and final chapter brings these literary lessons to the classroom, in order to argue for a pedagogy of witness based on learning’s repetitive remembering and forgetting, rather than the oft-employed rhetoric of crisis and conversion.Item Recovering women: autobiographical performances of illness experience(2007-05) Carr, Tessa Willoughby, 1970-; Miller, Lynn, 1951-This dissertation layers trauma studies theory with feminist theories of performance and autobiography to investigate how women's autobiographically based performances of illness experience disrupt and/or reinforce master discourses of medicine, identity, and knowledge. Feminist theories of performance and autobiography share with trauma studies the distrust of traditional frames and mechanisms of representation, and seek to discover new methods of interpreting experiences that lie "outside the realm" of normative discourse. These theories are further linked by their shared focus on agency and identity construction and an understanding of autobiography that emphasizes the limitations of language and memory which allows for aporia, contradiction, and dissonance, and the belief that testimony functions as a politicized performative of truth. Employing these theoretical perspectives, Carr investigates how these performances witness to radical reconfigurations of identity through the transference of trauma into conveyable life narrative -- even when those narratives falls outside the paradigm of traditional storytelling structures. Carr questions how the structures and content of these performances reveal what traumas are inflicted not only through illness, but also through treatment and care within the western medical model. Throughout the study Carr examines the moments when the cognitive structures of trauma are transmitted into performance through a variety of feminist and avant-garde performance techniques. Carr investigates the work of specific performers and contextualizes the performances within popular culture and medical discourse. Performances analyzed include; Robbie McCauley's Sugar, Susan Miller's My Left Breast, Brandyn Barbara Artis's Sister Girl, and Deb Margolin's bringing the fishermen home and Three Seconds in the Key. Carr questions how the formerly or currently ill female body performing in public disrupts notions of fixed and stable identity while examining the myriad identity constructions embedded within illness narrative. Rather than simplistic triumphant stories of individual cure and recovery, these complex expressions of traumatic experience reveal patterns of cultural oppression that keep the ill female body isolated and silenced. This study attempts to intervene in that silence by foregrounding these politicized performances.Item Trauma as [a narrative of] the sublime: the semiotics of silence(2005) Chandler, Eléna-Maria Antonia; Hess, Peter AndreasBoth traditional and contemporary approaches to psychic trauma begin with the basic assumption that trauma is a pathological disordering of the subject in response to “an event outside the range of human experience.” Such event-based approaches to trauma have failed to establish a unified understanding of the wide range of symptoms and experiences that accompany traumatic crisis. This study departs from these traditional assumptions, placing the range of existent discourse from fields such as psychology, ethics, social theory, cognitive science, and literary studies within the broader framework of semiotics and epistemology. This broader framework allows me to define the underlying problematic in trauma as the finitude of what can be expressed and understood by others, and the infinitude of human experience not bound by the structure of symbolic meaning. Beginning with this basic opposition, I develop a dynamic model of semiosis and subjectivity, in which the contrasting cognitive objectives of delimiting and expanding meaning can be understood as a productive differential that induces a current of experience, cognition, discourse, and identity. This dynamic model utilizes the anomalous symptoms and responses of traumatic crisis to expand existing models of subjectivity, since I argue that what we call “trauma” is actually an attenuation of sub-processes integral to the successful functioning of signification. The dynamic model of signification and subjectivity defined in this study provides a comprehensive explanation for what has seemed a widely scattered and unpredictable array of traumatic symptoms, situating physical, ethical, emotional and social “conflicts” within a single contiguous process. More importantly, it makes it feasible to talk about fields of study as disparate as psychology, cognitive science, social science using parallel models that are based upon the same principles. This will allow one field to contribute to another in a way that has not yet been possible, and has implications for the active treatment of traumatic crisis. Finally, the model developed here founds an overarching interpretive approach to trauma narrative that is textually based, and hence applicable to literatures from a different cultural and historical basis.