Trauma Memoir

Catalog description

In this course, students read contemporary memoirs (and portions of memoirs) that capture early childhood experience, particularly childhood trauma, often at the hands of family and society. Each work depicts a self defined in the context of trauma, and fortified by the turning of a traumatic experience into literature. The course also includes readings in literary criticism and psychological theory that illuminate the workings of memoir, and illustrate how memoirs may serve both artistic and psychological missions. The course considers how these missions correspond, and conflict, and how various works reconcile them. Students have the option to explore their own memories, and write their own pieces of memoir.