INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL TRAUMA AND MEMORY STUDIES

Course Objectives: This course aims to introduce students to the debates and founding texts of cultural trauma studies as well as recent critiques and revisions. This course is designed to explore how cultural trauma theory helps us understand modern histories and literatures of violence. Because such a theory seeks to describe a kind of violence that persists beyond an initial event, memory also becomes a central notion in approaches to trauma. Trauma both troubles ordinary memory and seems to call for new forms of remembrance, testimony, and witness as part of strategies of working through and confronting violence. This course establishes trauma, memory, and testimony as key categories to develop an analytical and critical perspective to explore a varied set of representations of trauma at a cultural level. Through an overview of works in various genres, from contemporary literature and visual arts to political cartoons to film adaptations, the course will study different ways that a collective trauma affects cultural products in a society.

Course Content: The course deals with representations of trauma in literature, art, and film and tackles the “crisis” of representation. We will read exemplary (film and print literary) texts (fiction and non-fiction) and place the respective works in their historical and cultural contexts, while also surveying the works’ narrative techniques The course includes literary, cinematic, and artistic works that respond to different types of trauma, ranging from war, slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust, to climate change.