Times of Trauma

Catalog description

How does trauma fracture narrative continuity and a cohesive sense of time? How can it collapse distinctions among past, present and future? These questions may seem particularly relevant after the past years of pandemic and lockdowns forced many to reconceptualize time. This course will explore theories about the nature of time and the coherence or fragmentation of Self. It will consider how traumas are documented, narrated, and passed on individually and in art, memorials, and performance. Readings may include Confessions (Augustine), Swann's Way (Marcel Proust), Moments of Being (Virginia Woolf), Austerlitz (W. B. Sebald), Maus (Art Spiegelman), The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien), Dora Bruder (Patrick Modiano), Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi) Lose Your Mother¨(Saidiya Harman), The Generation of Postmemory (Marianne Hirsch)The Melancholy of Race (Anne Anlin Cheng), The Fire Next Time (James Baldwin), Aftermath, (Susan Brison), poetry from and about Ukraine and contemporary essays on how current news, discourse, and assaults can trigger traumatic symptoms and returns of the past.