Traumatic Images

Catalog description

FNRT-783 is a graduate-level counterpart to FNRT-483. Students enrolled under the 783 number will be required to read extensively in trauma theory, especially Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys, Lisa Saltzman, and Eric Rosenberg. This theoretical discourse will contextualize course readings and material. Students will also meet with the professor outside of class for an additional weekly discussion; and produce a final project that connects with their thesis work. Traumatic Images investigates visual culture and its imagistic response to life's crises. Problems of identity and identification will be explored and confronted through works of photography, painting, mixed media, new media and film of the 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries. Beginning with the late 19th Century vogue for images of hysterical women, crippled black-sheep family members and dead loved ones (as corpses and as ghosts), we then move on to consider the last century's fascination with pain and suffering, disease and violence, struggle and survival and then the 21st century’s emphasis on terrorism. Specifically, we will focus on the gendering of images and imaging as disturbing pictures work to defy the formal and theoretical distinction between private and public, personal and collective experience and manage the often conflicting responsibilities to self, family, religion, race, nation and society.