ENGL 569 B1: The Traumatic Event

K. Ball

This course will offer an opportunity to explore figurations of the traumatic event and its aftermath through a range of late twentieth and early twenty-first century theoretical and literary texts that amplify the conditions and limits of bearing witness and/or depict the psychic wounds that painful histories leave behind. To outline the major issues and themes that will preoccupy us during the first third of the course, we will begin with Hayden White’s reflections in “The Modernist Event” about the challenges of representing the pathos generated by historical phenomena that overwhelm our ability to comprehend them.  Our discussion will subsequently turn to Sigmund Freud’s post-World War I theses on compulsive repetition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the canonical departure point for the field of trauma studies that emerged in the 1990s, before we compare a few pivotal contributions to this emergence by Cathy Caruth, Laura S. Brown, Kai T. Erikson, Marianne Hirsch, Michael Rothberg, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Didier Fassin, and Lauren Berlant among others. During the following weeks, we will evaluate the lessons we have drawn from White, Freud, and recent trauma theory through our examinations of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Eden Robinson’s Traplines, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.  These texts will also provide occasions to contemplate the role of literature (and culture more generally) in bearing witness to and working through violence, suffering, and their disturbing remainders.