2008-09 AM Trauma Narratives

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 !Attention!

The reader IS NOW available on Stud-IP.

Winter Term 2008/09

Lecturer: Christina Meyer

Office Hours: We 3:00-4:pm; A06 2-212b

Fon: 0441-798-4570

E-Mail: christina.meyer@uni-oldenburg.de



Course Outline

This course aims to deepen our understanding of psychological traumas. We will reflect on issues such as the impact of traumatizing encounters (on individuals and on entire cultures and nations), survivor-guilt, long-term effects, and coping strategies. In the course we will address the following areas of concern: trauma and memory; trauma and (the politics of) loss; war and trauma; trauma and sexual abuse; trauma and 9-11; trauma and the Holocaust. We will deal with representations of trauma in literature, art, and film and tackle the “crisis” of representation. We will read exemplary (filmic 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. Likely authors include: Charlotte Delbo, George Perec, Anna Langfus, Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, Toni Morrison, Art Spiegelman. Further readings (excerpts): Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Cathy Caruth, Kalí Tal, Judith Klein, Lawrence Langer, Dominick LaCapra, and more. Please purchase Art Spiegelman’s, The Complete Maus (Penguin, 2003, approx. 20 Euro), Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story (Vintage, approx. 9 Euro)

Prerequisites for 3KP (general): regular attendance, active participation, group work, in-class oral presentation (approx. 15 minutes)

Prerequisites for 6KP: all of the above, final term paper (10-12 pages, approx. 5000 words)

Starting on: October 14, 2008 Language in class: English Limited Enrollment: 25 students For further information: christina.meyer@uni-oldenburg.de

ATTENTION: The DEADLINE to submit the TERM PAPER is March 1, 2009. NO EXCEPTION!!!!!!!


Syllabus

Par I: Intro

  • Oct. 14, 2008 Organization
  • Oct. 21, 2008 Defining Psychological Trauma

Texts: 1) Cathy Caruth, “Introduction”; 2) Dori Laub “Bearing Witness”


Part II: Limits of Representation? Trauma and the Holocaust

  • Oct. 28, 2008 Voicing the Unspeakable

Text: Kalí Tal, “Reading the Literatures of Trauma” (1-22)

  • Nov. 04, 2008 Reflections on Filmic Narratives about the Holocaust

Group Work: Texts: 1) James Edward Young, “Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation” (1-11); 2) Elie Wiesel, “Art and Culture after the Holocaust”

ATTENTION: Kalí Tal is going to give a talk on November 4, 2008 at 6pm!

  • Nov. 11, 2008 Film and the Holoaust: A Traumatic Paradox?

Text: Dominick LaCapra, “Lanzmann’s Shoah” Presentation: “The Holocaust and Cinema: Shoah, A Case Study”

  • Nov. 18, 2008 Holocaust and the Medium Comic?

Text: Art Spiegelman, Maus

  • Nov. 25, 2008 Art Spiegelman, Maus , cont’d

Text: Michael E. Staub, “The Shoah Goes On and On”

  • Dec. 02, 2008 Art Spiegelman, Maus cont’d

Presentation: “History as Comic – Comic as History?”


Part III: Fictionalizing War Traumas

  • Dec. 09, 2008 The Vietnam War

Text: Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story Presentation: “From Shell Shock to PTSD”

  • Dec. 16, 2008 Larry Heinemann Paco’s Story, cont’d

CHRISTMAS BREAK

  • Jan. 06, 2009 Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story, recapitulating

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (excerpts) Presentation: “Veteran-Writer Tim O’Brien: Story-Truth and Happening-Truth”

  • Jan. 13, 2009 Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (excerpts) cont’d


Part IV: Trauma and 9/11

  • Jan. 20, 2009 Comic Artists Respond to 9-11

Texts: Will Eisner, 1) “The Real Thing”; 2) “Reality 9/11” (mandatory) Presentation: “Approaches to 9/11: TriBeCa Sunset and The 9/11 Report – A Graphic Adaptation”

  • Jan. 27, 2009 Framing Trauma

Text: Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (excerpts)

  • Febr. 03, 2009 Ground Zero

Text: Marita Sturken, “Tourism and ‘Sacred Ground’” (165-218). Round-up


Reading Requirements

  • Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. (excerpt)
  • Eisner, Will. “The Real Thing.” 9-11: The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers and Artists Tell Stories to Remember. New York: DC Comics, 2002. 17-18.
  • ---. “Reality 9/11.” 9-11: Emergency Relief. Ed. Jeff Mason. New York: Alternative Comics, 2002. 45.
  • Heinemann, Larry. Paco’s Story. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986. (or a new edition)
  • Laub, Dori. “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Eds. Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 1992. 57-74.
  • LaCapra, Dominick. “Lanzmann’s Shoah: Here There Is No Why.” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (Winter, 1997): 231-269.
  • O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. London: Flamingo, 1990. (excerpts)
  • Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. London, New York et al.: Penguin, 2003.
  • ---. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004.
  • Staub, Michael E. “The Shoah Goes On and On: Remembrance and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus.” MELUS 20.3 (Autumn, 1995): 33-46.
  • Sturken, Marita. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham et al.: Duke UP, 2007. (excerpts)
  • Tal, Kalí. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge, England & New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. (excerpts)


Reading Suggestions (for your term paper)

  • Aberbach, David. Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature and Psychoanalysis. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1989
  • American Psychiatric Association. DSM-III-R: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 3rd rev. Ed. (DSM-III-R) Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association Press, 1987
  • Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: C.H. Beck, 1999
  • Baer, Ulrich. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA & London, England: MIT Press, 2002.
  • Bao Ninh. The Sorrow of War. Trans. Phan Thanh Hao. Ed. Frank Palmos. New York: Riverhead Books, 1993.
  • Belau, Linda M., and Petar Ramadanovic, eds. Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory. New York: Other Press, 2002
  • Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Cultural Memory in the Present. Ed. Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
  • Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P, 1999.
  • Bettelheim, Bruno. The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1960.
  • Bibby, Michael, ed. The Vietnam War and Postmodernity. Amherst, MA: UMass P, 2000. (excerpts)
  • Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. 1986. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995.
  • Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art. An Introduction. 6th ed. New York: Graw-Hill, 2001.
  • Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
  • ---. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996
  • Culbertson, Roberta. “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-Establishing the Self.” New Literary History 26.1 (1995): 169-95
  • Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.
  • Elmwood, Victoria A. “‘Happy, Happy Every After’: The Transformation of Trauma Between the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.” Biography 27.4 (Fall 2004): 691-720
  • Eng, David L.. “The Value of Silence.” Theatre Journal 54 (2002): 85-94.
  • Farrell, Kirby. Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998.
  • Fleischner, Eva, ed. Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust. New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1974.
  • Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
  • Freud, Sigmund. Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer TB, 1991.
  • Friedlander, Saul. Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death. Trans. Thomas Weyr. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
  • Greenberg, Judith. “The Echo of Trauma and the Trauma of Echo.” American Imago 55.3 (1998): 319-47.
  • ---, ed. Trauma at Home After 9/11. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003.
  • Gordon, Ian. “From Caricature to Comic Strips: The Shaping of Comic Art as Commodity.” Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890-1945. Ian Gordon. Washington & London: Smithsonian Institution P, 1998.14-36.
  • Hartman, Geoffrey H. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 26 (1995): 537-63.
  • Haugen, David M., ed. Comic Books: Examining Pop Culture. Detroit, New York et al.: Thomson Gale, 2005.
  • Hebel, Udo J., ed. Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2003.
  • Heller, Dana, ed. The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity. New York et al.: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.
  • Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
  • Hixson, Walter L., ed. The United States and the Vietnam War. 6 vols. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc, 2000.
  • Hölbling, Walter. Fiktionen vom Krieg im neueren amerikanischen Roman. Tübinger Beiträge zur Anglistik 10. Tübingen: G. Narr, 1987.
  • Irsliger, Ingo and Christoph Jürgensen, ed. Nine Eleven. Ästhetische Verarbeitungen des 11. September 2001. Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte 255. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2008
  • Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
  • Kaplan, E. Ann. “A Camera and a Catastrophe: Reflections on Trauma and the Twin Towers.” Greenberg 96-103.
  • Klein, Judith. Literatur und Genozid: Darstellungen der nationalsozialistischen Massenvernichtung in der französischen Literatur. Literatur in der Geschichte-Geschichte in der Literatur 24. Ed. Klaus Amann and Friedbert Aspetsberger. Wien et al.: Böhlau, 1992.
  • Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. 1981. Book XI. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.” Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.
  • LaCapra, Dominick. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1994.
  • ---. History and Memory After Auschwitz. Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 1998.
  • ---. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
  • Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1991.
  • Laub, Dori. “September 11, 2001—An Event without a Voice.” Greenberg 204-215.
  • Leach, Neil. “9/11.” Diacritics 33.3-4 (Fall/Winter, 2003): 75-92.
  • Leys, Ruth. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
  • Lifton, Robert Jay. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973.
  • ---. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
  • Krog, Antjie. Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999.
  • Martin, Richard. “Art Spiegelman’s Maus, or ‘The Way it Really Happened.’” Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature. Eds. Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1994. 373-382
  • Mitchell, Juliet. “Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of Language.” Diacritics 28.4 (1998): 121-33.
  • Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete. The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior. Pref. Robert Jay Lifton. Trans. Beverly R. Placzek. New York: Grove Press, 1975.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

  • Mowitt, John. “Trauma Envy.” Cultural Critique 46 (Fall 2000): 272-297.
  • O’Brien, Tim. In the Lake of the Woods. 1994. New York et al.: Penguin, 1995.
  • Orvell, Miles. “Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Maus, and the Contemporary Fiction Cartoon.” American Literary History 4.1 (Spring, 1992): 110-128.
  • Paul, Gavin J. “Ashes in the Gutter: 9/11 and the Serialization of Memory in DC Comics’ Human Target.” American Periodicals 17.2 (2007): 208-227
  • Rowe, John Carlos, and Rick Berg, eds. The Vietnam War and American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. (esp.: “Eyewitness: Documentary Styles in the American Representations of Vietnam,” pp. 148-174)
  • Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York & Oxford et al.: Oxford UP, 1985.
  • Schacter, Daniel L. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: BasicBooks, 1996.
  • Seltzer, Mark. “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere.” October 80 (Spring 1997): 3-26.
  • Shatan, Chaim F. “Post-Vietnam Syndrome.” The New York Times 6 May 1972: 35.
  • ---. “The Grief of Soldiers: Vietnam Combat Veterans’ Self-Help Movement.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 43.4 (July 1973): 640-653.
  • Shay, Jonathan, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York et al.: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
  • ---. Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. New York: Scribner, 2002.
  • Slocum, David J., ed. Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. New York et al.: Routledge, 2006.
  • Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003.
  • Tatum, James. The Mourner’s Song: War and Remembrance from the Iliad to Vietnam. Chicago et al.: U of Chicago P, 2003.
  • van der Kolk, Bessel A. and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” American Imago 48.4 (Winter 1991): 425-454.
  • Vernon, Alex. Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O’Brien. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2004.
  • Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002.
  • Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes. Boston: Beacon, 1972.
  • Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. 6th ed. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London & New York: Verson, 2000.
  • Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. 1969. New York: Dell, 1991.
  • White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn 1980): 5-27.
  • Wiesel, Elie. Night. The Night Trilogy. Trans. Stella Rodway. 1960; New York: Noonday Press, 1985.
  • Witek, Joseph, ed. Art Spiegelman Conversations. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2007
  • Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. 1966. Chicago: U of Chicago P; London: Routledge, 1974.
  • Young, James Edward. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988.
  • ---. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History.” Critical Inquiry 24 (Spring 1998): 666-699.
  • Zelizer, Barbie, ed. Visual Culture and the Holocaust. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000.
  • Žižek, Slavoj. “Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance.” Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London & New York: Verso, 2002. 5-32.
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