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War Trauma
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Transcript of War Trauma
War Trauma
Trauma theory
9/11 and trauma
Reading traumatic texts
DeLillo, Falling Man
Auster, Man in the Dark
Trauma
Trauma overwhelm existing meaning systems.
An event outside the range of human experience.
The most significant question then is: what is the range of human experience?
Gender, race, class, ethnicity, religion and more are all components to be considered.
What is traumatic to some is not traumatic to others.
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience
Trauma is unassimilated, not known in the first instance but returns to haunt the survivor. (4)
Tells of what is not grasped. (6)
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience
"What returns to haunt the victim, these stories tell us, is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known." (6)
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience
"The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all." (17)
We can connect this to our notion of cultural memory.
Trauma and Memory
Why and how the past is remembered has increasingly become a source of conflict
(Andrew Hoskins, Televising War 3)
What is the range of human experience?
Which and whose experiences are the most significant?
In relation to 9/11?
9/11 and Trauma
Responses to September 11 is a symptom of cultural amnesia in that it narrowly focuses on concrete dramatic events while neglecting context.
Janice Haaken: Cultural Amnesia: Memory, Trauma, and War
9/11 and Trauma
Projective identification is an elaboration of this defensive splitting, where disturbing feelings of destructiveness within the self or the group are kept at a distance by projecting the bad onto an external order.
Janice Haaken: Cultural Amnesia: Memory, Trauma, and War
9/11 and Trauma
Refusal to develop political background reproduces a tendency to assume that good motives are enough to justify any action.
(McAlister, A Cultural History of the War Without End 454)
9/11 and Trauma
Cultural texts do not inject ideologies into their audiences, but they do figure in the process of constructing frameworks that help policy make sense in a given moment.
(McAlister, A Cultural History of the War Without End 441)
9/11 and Trauma
All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives.
(Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities 204)
Reading trauma texts
A theory emerges focusing on the relationship of words and trauma, and helping us to read the wound with the aid of literature.
(Hartmann, On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies 537)
Reading trauma texts
Knowledge of trauma is composed of two contradictory elements:
The traumatic event, registered rather than experienced.
The memory of the event, perpetually troped.
This can be considered as the difference between literal and figurative levels.
(Hartmann, On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies 537)
Reading trauma texts
The disjunction between experiencing and understanding, is what figurative language expresses.
(Hartmann, On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies 539)
Reading trauma texts
One reason why the real does not appear directly, or why it is not expressed in a realistic mode, is that trauma can include a rupture of the symbolic order. [...] Fantasy has entered to repair a breach not so much a breach of the symbolic as between the symbolic and the individual.
(Hartmann, On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies 542)
Reading trauma texts
It heightens knowledge by symbolic means, but its realism and its symbolic pattern are kept in a tension that is not entirely on the side of disclosure.
(Hartmann, On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies 543)
Reading trauma texts
The symbolic, in this sense, is not a denial of literal or referential but its uncanny intensification.
(Hartmann, On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies 546)
Reading trauma texts
But instead of seeking premature knowledge, it [trauma theory] stays longer in the negative and allows the disturbances of language and mind the quality of time we give to literature.
(Hartmann, On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies 546)
Don DeLillo
American novelist from the Bronx.
White Noise
Underworld
Falling Man
Themes of consumerism, media, terror.
The Falling Man
Photo: Richard Drew
Don DeLillo, Falling Man
Disintegrating marriage.
The impact of terrorism and the images that followed.
The figure of the falling man.
Paul Auster
Born in Newark, lives in Brooklyn.
New York Trilogy
Moon Palace
Man in the Dark
Themes of coincidence, loss of language, metafiction, loss of identity
Paul Auster, Man in the Dark
Alternative history.
Metafiction the relationship between reader, author and fiction.
Civil war and New York secession.