IPP WORKSHOP SERIES | Louise Louw: “Reading Trauma Narratives: Understanding the Value of Contemporary Fiction in Conveying Traumatic Memory”
- https://www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties/ggkgcsc/ggk-gcsc-calendar/wise-2425/ipp/ws-ipp-traumatic-memory
- IPP WORKSHOP SERIES | Louise Louw: “Reading Trauma Narratives: Understanding the Value of Contemporary Fiction in Conveying Traumatic Memory”
- 2025-02-06T14:00:00+01:00
- 2025-02-06T16:00:00+01:00
Ever since the term PTSD was first coined in 1980, there has been a growing interest in trauma research, with psychologists and literary scholars alike looking towards new ways of understanding trauma as “a response to events so overwhelmingly intense that they impair normal emotional or cognitive responses and bring lasting psychological disruption” (Vickroy, ix). Drawing on Laurie Vickroy’s seminal text, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (2002) wherein she argues she introduces the “trauma narrative” as an emerging genre of fiction devoted to the exploration of the subject– this workshop is aimed at elucidating how contemporary fiction functions in representing intangible concepts such as historical and collective traumas.
We will look at how psychic expressions of trauma, such as Sigmund Freud’s “repetition compulsion” (Forter, 260) and Cathy Caruth’s notion of “latency” are represented through narrative methods that highlight the temporal paradoxes, flashbacks, forgetting, amnesia, and moments of outright disassociation that characterise unprocessed traumatic memory (Explorations in Memory, 152). Through the close reading of selected passages, we will evaluate how contemporary fictional texts, operating under a unique set of narrative affordances, are able to represent trauma mimetically and stylistically through narrative techniques such as vignettes, analepsis, fragmented narrative, and dreams without detracting from their testimonial and therapeutic value. Thus, by looking how fictional narration mimics the “nonlinear movements” of memory that allows “trauma to register in language and its hesitations, indirections, pauses, and silences” (Rossington et al., 208), we will explore how trauma narratives not only demand reader participation, but also foster empathy through language.
Works Cited:
Caruth, Cathy. "Explorations in Memory." Baltimore/London (1995): vii, 151-157.
Forter, Greg. "Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form." Narrative 15.3 (2007): 259-285.
Rossington, Michael, Anne Whitehead, and Linda R. Anderson. Theories of Memory: a reader. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, 2002.
To register: Winter Term 2024/25 — The Graduate Centre (uni-giessen.de)