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The Life to Come: Theories of Trauma, Narrative Retrospection, and Social Change                                                                   Spring 2015
Dr. Stephan Flores (sflores@uidaho.edu)
2:00pm-3:15pm TR   TLC 030
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/                                                  Brink 200/English Department: 885-6156
Office hours: W 2:30pm-4:00 p.m. & by appt.                                            Brink 125

What to say about the unspeakable? Why study trauma/theory? How might we think and write about traumatic events and the literature of trauma?

By studying theories of trauma we explore the concept, capacities and limits of literature, of narrative and representation, and juxtapose narratives inflected by culture, history, and rhetorical response with the registers of psychical experience, feeling, and affect.

We’ll move—via Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and other theorists/philosophers (such as Cathy Caruth, Michelle Balaev, Michael Roth, Roger Luckhurst, Alan Gibbs (who is quite critical of Caruth), Stef Craps, Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau)—from the traumatic advent of subjectivity and related states of loss, desire, and “enjoyment” to a concise review of broader, interdisciplinary contexts of theories of trauma—our focus shall remain, however, primarily on psychoanalytic and cultural forms of trauma/theory. The several novels selected present settings and subjects/events that include different narrative voices in a Holocaust concentration camp (Amis), and the perspective and stylistically distinctive prose voice of a girl/young woman living with ongoing sexual abuse and familial strife (McBride), and a relatively quick/focused consideration of criticism on a 'haunted/gothic' postwar class-divided country house (Waters). Moreover, the overviews by Luckhurst and Gibbs (as well as other scholars/critics), provide a substantial introduction to theories of trauma and to a range of literary works and narrative strategies/techniques within the shifting generic boundaries of "trauma literature."

Luckhurst and Gibbs write in ways that address the theories of trauma that can enable understanding and analysis (particularly of literary works), and also they consider how such theories/premises and literary history shapes conditions for the production of works aligned or marketed to particular conceptions of what constitutes "trauma literature." This kind of consideratin of both analysis and literary production may make this course/topic/approach of interest both to students in the English M.A. degree program and the M.F.A. program.

Questions abound: What drives or enables us to return, to claim or disavow, to surpass traumatic events or narratives of traumatic experience? Does the backward glance make futurity—including social change—possible, or does it prevent us from becoming someone else, someone different?

Emphasis on class discussion and consideration of a range of scholarship on these provocative, frequently disturbing and challenging topics/texts/contexts; written work includes Inquiry Starter questions/comments, a Critical Analysis on theory/literature, a Critical Summary-Response to one or more theory texts, and a Term Essay on a topic of your choice, typically leveraging/engaging theory with a particular literary text.

Primary required texts (see highlighted links for more information and reviews of these books):

Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
ISBN: 978-0415402712

McBride, Eimear. A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2014 (orig. publ. 2013).
ISBN: 978-1-56689-368-8

Waters, Sarah. The Little Stranger. Riverhead Books, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-59448-446-9 Note: we will discuss a couple of essays on this intriguing/compelling novel but spend relatively little class time for discussion of the literary text itself, so that I do not expect you to necessarily finish reading this work but hope that it may provide a good option for some of you who get caught up in its narrative. That is, if you choose not to buy this novel, that would be OK--it's relatively inexpensive in paperback ($10.00 or less), and as I said, a very interesting work, so I encourage you to buy it and read as much as you can in the framework of your other work and reading in our course schedule.

Jonathan Culler: "there is no determining in advance what might count as relevant, what enlarging of context might be able to shift what we regard as the meaning of a text. Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless.”

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “in every textual production, in the production of every explanation, there is the itinerary of a constantly thwarted desire to make the text explain. . . . what inhabits the prohibited margin of a particular explanation specifies its particular politics.”

Petar Ramadanovic: “In the last twenty years there have been essentially two views of trauma, one that it is a structural disorder and one that it is a historical event. . . . Moreover, isn’t literature precisely a form of turning toward a catastrophe, an instinct, and a desire—an attempt to face them in the most radical and immediate way possible?”

Roger Luckhurst: “Trauma, in effect, issues a challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge. In its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative, but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explicate the trauma . . . culture rehearses or restates narratives that attempt to animate and explicate trauma that has been formulated as something that exceeds the possibility of narrative knowledge. . . . if trauma is a crisis in representation, then this generates narrative possibility just as much as impossibility, a compulsive outpouring of attempts to formulate narrative knowledge.”

Todd McGowan: “Subjects structure their everyday social reality around an avoidance of a traumatic kernel that nonetheless haunts that reality and continually upsets its smooth functioning. . . . The encounter with the traumatic gap in signification is inherently a political event because it exposes the contingency of the symbolic structure and makes evident the fundamental symbolic lie. . . . Subjects invest themselves in and submit to the symbolic law insofar as they believe in its ability to confer meaning and identity, and this is precisely what the encounter with the traumatic gap gives the lie to. . . . A society centered around the death drive would not be a better society, nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually sacrificing for the sake of the good, we would sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A society centered around the death drive would allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost object only insofar as it remains lost.”

Michelle Balaev: “The primacy of place in the representations of trauma anchors the individual experience within a larger cultural context because place attains its meaningful import based on individual perception and symbolic significance accorded by culture. In different ways, each author situates traumatic events in specific cultural contexts that shape the meaning and remembrance of trauma."

1. Ten Bblearn Inquiry Starters: a thesis/problem-driven response (approximately 175 words each in which you take a stance/make a claim, state a point of view/thesis, typically in relation to a specific passage in a theory or literary text under discussion. Inquiry Starters present a means for you and the class to share enthusiasms and questions as you delve into the text’s (theory/argument's) significance, methods, and effects, and to learn from others' comments (a version of Graff's "They Say, I Say" exchange, see Bblearn).Inquiry Starters are due to be posted on Bblearn before class (by 7:00 am the day of class but preferably posted the night before class). Come to class prepared to talk about your ISs/ideas; in class, different students will rotate responsbility to spotlight individual ISs and ideas to facilitate and to lead discussion--see the syllabus/schedule below for first names of students assigned for each Inquiry Starter discussion. That is, you will be responsible for initiating and leading such a discussion once during the semester, and so you should have selected at least one classmate's IS post to respond to/talk about, use as a point of departure for facilitating further discussion. Missing or late inquiry-starter entries will be counted against your semester grade (minus 5 points each, see below). Note: if you miss an Inquiry-Starter due on a Tuesday, you may post an Inquiry-Starter that responds to the readings for the Thursday class—this exception can occur up to three times during the semester!

2. A Critical Analysis: Titled, 5-6 pp. for main body of essay excluding Works Cited page, double-spaced, 12 pt. Times-New Roman font, 1-inch margins, MLA format. This analysis directs you to explore a significant problem (theoretical concept/question, including consideration of rhetorical concerns, that is, persuasive strategies) that you identify in one or more works. For instance, what claim or line of argument/premise do you find most compelling and/or problematic in Cathy Caruth's work? What have you learned about what might comprise the criteria for defining trauma literature or an aesthetic of trauma, and what boundaries or contradictions/difificulties accompany such efforts to define trauma 'literature'? What strategies of analysis and evidence/illustration/argument have you found most helpful in Luckhurst's work, and why? How has your own 'repertoire' of analysis and understanding developed on the topic of trauma theory and literature in the past few weeks? What questions or problems remain and recur? Why? A sharply focused explanation/exploration and analysis may contain the kernel of a hypothesis that could serve as the cornerstone? or shaping idea for the Term Essay. Your analysis can be quite "thesis-driven"—that is, you may find it effective to compose a thesis for your response that maps out for readers the engaging, important points that you want to develop—or you may prefer a more reflective, question and problem-posing approach that still manages to test a hypothesis and to draw upon our readings and to advance understanding in critical, specific ways. Your materials are likely to draw upon and respond to Caruth's work and/or Luckhurst, and you have the option to refer as well to other literary texts (or other media)--Hard copy due in class but send electronic copy to me by email (MS Word or RTF file) by 7:00am on the due date (Note: you may extend the due date until Wednesday 4:45 pm without penalty). See also general advice for critical essays.

3. A Summary-Review and Critical Response (due April 14) that presents two focused summaries (Part One, 300 words for each summary) of key aspects of two of the theory texts (book chapters or essays that we have not yet discussed in class, selected from PDFs on Bblearn)—you might select two theorists whose perspectives are similar so that each theorist/work tends to reiterate/amplify/complement the other—or you might very well select two theorists/works that are significantly different, or that explicitly contradict or feature opposed perspectives and arguments/premises. For Part Two, the Part One summaries are to be followed by one reflective, question -and problem-posing critical essay response to the summarized essays’ perspectives/interpretations/arguments (Part Two Essay, minimum of 1250 words, approximately 6 pp.) so that you draw out/take away what you consider to be the most interesting, problematic, and perhaps different emphases or ideas from the two scholarly pieces.

In Part One (two summaries) you should present a straightforward, selective account of what you consider to be each essay's primary, most important or engaging ideas and points of argument and interpretation. After reading each essay closely—perhaps making marginal notes or separate notes as you go to identify questions or reflect on why you consider a particular passage or concept important (for example, is it a major or new point in the argument, a significant piece of support, a summary of the opposition, an important theoretical premise/move/point of reference and departure)—you might then explore your initial approach to the Part One summary and to your Part Two response by determining to what extent and how the reading has influenced your views and understanding, by determining points of agreement or doubt, by determining significant questions raised by your experience with this essay, by determining the most important ideas you "take away" from the reading, and by reflecting on what you might "say back" to the author in sharing your perspective on the essay(s), perhaps in the contexts of what we have studied thus far this semester.

As you write each summary, work from your sense of the scholarly text's structure and content, and it may be helpful to have in mind the gist of each paragraph—its function or purpose and a brief summary of its content (what it "does" and what it "says," usually a response to an implicit question)—to serve as a basis to consider for the summary.

Your summary should strive to represent the essay—or an important aspect of it—accurately and fairly. Be direct and concise, take as much as possible a fair, nonpartisan stance and tone, and except for brief quotes use your own words to express the author's ideas, use attributive tags (such as according to Caruth or Luckhurst argues that) to keep the reader informed that you are expressing another's ideas, and focus the summary to produce a cohesive and coherent account. You might begin the summary by identifying the question or the problem that the reading addresses, then state the theoretical text's purpose or thesis and summarize its argument or primary analysis point by point (or as best you can, given the restrictions on length of the summary).

Part Two should express your understanding of the original essays’ rhetorical strategies and theoretical premises, and the effectiveness and significance of their respective arguments. You should also extend each essay's critical perspectives by explaining its potential relevance to your developing understanding, interests/practices, and/or its relevance to literature or a particular work of literature, or also you may read "against-the-grain" of the original argument to present a different or opposing perspective and argument based on our studies, on other critical perspectives, and on your own understanding and reasoning. Your response can be both reflective and persuasive in its emphases and aims, and our discussions and reading may inform your views. Finally, include a complete bibliographic citation to note the author, essay title, place of publication, publisher, date, and page numbers for the article.

Your essays are relatively succinct, but I encourage you to develop and to support your ideas as clearly and as cogently as space allows, including brief citations of specific lines that illustrate your understanding, and use of summary and paraphrase in support of each analysis. It is helpful for your argument (advisable) to include a statement that makes a claim or presents a thesis with explanation and support. Your interpretations are to be explanatory and implicitly argumentative: an occasion for you to clarify and advance your understanding. This is a chance to share your perceptions, enthusiasms, and doubts as you delve into an aspect of our studies.

4.Term Essay: 3000+ words for body of essay (approximately 12+ pages, excluding Works Cited page), double-spaced, 12 pt, Times New Roman, 1-inch margins, MLA format). This critical essay develops ideas prompted by our study, discussion, by recent scholarship, and by your perspectives. I shall attend to the ways that you select, define, and engage questions and contradictions, and to the clarity, imagination, and grace that you demonstrate in presenting your topic, (hypo)thesis, and argument, and the extent to which your work engages with, explains, and contributes to the larger 'conversation' of trauma theory/scholarship/history on the topic and text or question under analysis. I do not always expect essays to conclude by 'solving' such problems or by 'proving' your thesis; I hope that you address interesting topics (questions for debate, interpretation, and analysis) in thoughtful and useful ways. For example, can you make an argument about how one or more of our literary texts (novels) yields a 'theory' of trauma, or what a text may tell us about the circulation or politics of trauma and its effects? Can you compare one or more texts to formulate your 'own' theoretical argument about trauma theory and/or trauma in literature and/or culture? As mentioned above, be sure to engage in dialogue with other trauma theorists. I also am open to exploring an approach to the Term Essay 'project' that includes reflective observations and arguments that address narrative strategies/techniques ('craft' concerns) and questions of the genre of trauma literature (this may be useful to MFA students but also of interest to graduate students in the M.A. degree program. Such a 'craft analysis' essay focuses on how a text is produced (such as one or more of the novels that we have read along with our theory texts) in order to make a claim about how a writer deploys/adapts/modifies particular elements of 'craft' (e.g., backstory, characterization, conflict/crisis/resolution, description/exposition, details, emotion, epiphany, flashback and flashforward, free indirect discourse, imagery/figurative language, point of view, repetition, tense, tone/voice, and related narrative strategies/techniques) with support for your analysis and argument from the text. For example, how do one or more of such 'craft' elements and techniques work to evoke or to represent traumatic experiences and effects? What seems puzzling about what a writer is up to and why the text may be designed to produce particular effects, outcomes. What do traum theorists have to say about these aspects of narrative technique/structure? In addition to the essay, you may also decide to append your own creative work to illustrate some aspect of trauma in literature, with a concise note of introduction to that appended piece that explains how your craft analysis and research may have influenced your own creative writing. We will arrange for you to confer with me during the writing process. Note: You may draw upon and revise material from prior written work (DS entries or Critical Analysis and Summary) to form part of this essay; do not, however, cobble together two or three assignments, repeating word for word to form this larger assignment. Please feel invited to confer with me during the writing process. See also general advice for critical essays. Note that the Term Essay is due in class on Thursday May 7; it may be turned in one day late on Friday without penalty, hard copy in my Brink Hall mailbox by 4:00pm, and it may be turned in as late as but no later than 4:00 pm on May 11 (with penalty of minus 5 points).

5. Participation: Please take advantage of opportunities to share your insights and to listen and reply to others' ideas. I hope that questions and discussions will enable you to move the class in directions you find most helpful, give you opportunities to develop critical skills through collaboration, and provide for a productive, interesting exchange of perspectives among the class. You may meet periodically in small groups in class primarily for sharing Inquiry-Starters and Discussion Starters (as noted above). I expect you to contribute productively to class discussion, and I will make an effort to call on you directly, especially if you tend not to pitch in to share your views and questions.

6. All required work is due at the beginning of class on the due date—work turned in late will be graded accordingly. Required graded written work will be downgraded one notch (for example, B+ to B, converted to points for each assignment) for each weekday late (not just days classes meet but counting just one day for a weekend). Note that the Term Essay is due in class on May 7; it may be turned in one day late on Friday without penalty, hard copy in my Brink Hall mailbox by 4:00pm, and it may be turned in as late as but no later than 4:00 pm on May 11 (with one day penalty of minus 4 points). Earlier/during the semester, work submitted more than a week late will not be accepted. I will grant short extensions for medical and family emergencies—but talk with me as soon as possible to request an extension. Always keep copies of your work.

7. Attendance: always attend class (unless you are sick). One or two absences will not affect your semester grade; a third absence will lower your semester total by three points, with a five-point reduction for each additional absence (four absences=minus 8 points, five absences = minus 13 points); six or more absences is sufficient cause for you to receive a failing grade for the course, regardless of your semester point total. All absences will be counted—excused or not—if something extraordinary occurs, talk to me.

8. Grades: Critical Analysis (30 pts); Summary-Review and Critical Response (50 pts); Term Essay (130 pts). These three required/graded assignments add up to a maximum of 210 points. Thus 189-210 points equals an A, 168-188 equals a B, 147-167 equals a C, 126-146 equals a D, and anything below 126 receives an F. I shall reserve a potential five bonus points based on my perceptions of the strength of your participation and efforts over the semester; incomplete or missing inquiry-starter entries will be counted against your semester grade, with the loss of five points for each missing or incomplete entry, to a maximum loss of 50 points. Note, therefore, that missing even one Inquiry Starter combined for example with three absences, could affect your overall semester grade by lowering your total points by 8 points.

9. Office hours. I encourage you to confer with me—especially before assignments are due—to talk about your interests, intentions, and writing strategies. If you cannot make my regular hours (in Brink 125), we’ll arrange another time. I also welcome communicating with you by E-mail (sflores@uidaho.edu).

10. Use of laptops and cell phones during class is prohibited except for class purposes, such as reading a PDF of theory texts.

11. Do not submit work for this class that you have submitted or intend to submit for a grade in another course; as always, be careful to cite anyone else's work that you draw upon. See highlighted link on the class website to a useful guide to avoiding plagiarism, and a link to information on the university's policies regarding plagiarism.

12. Classroom Learning and Civility: To support learning and discovery in this course—as in any university course—it is essential that each member of the class feel as free and as safe as possible in his or her participation. To this end, we must collectively expect that everyone (students, professors, and guests) seek to be respectful and civil to one another in discussion, in action, in teaching, and in learning. Because knowledge and learning are constructed and construed through social inquiry and exchange, it is vital that course dialogue and debate encourage and expect a substantial range of reasoned, expressive, and impassioned articulation of diverse views in order to build a stronger understanding of the materials and of one another's ways of knowing. These practices strengthen our capacities for understanding and the production of (new) knowledge. As with the critical writing assignments for this class, our primary aims include engaging with texts and their varied critical interpretations by identifying problems, developing claims and arguments with supporting lines of evidence and explanation, and enriching our theoretical and literary understanding, interests, and commitments. The topic of trauma theory is by definition highly charged and as a class we shall strive to explore the course materials in productive and professional ways, with understanding and affective concern.

Should you feel our classroom interactions do not reflect an environment of civility and respect, you are encouraged to meet with me during office hours to discuss your concern. Additional resources for expression of concern and avenues of support include the chair of the Department of English, Dr. Scott Slovic, the Dean of Students office and staff (5-6757), the UI Counseling & Testing Center’s confidential services (5-6716), or the UI Office of Human Rights, Access, & Inclusion (5-4285).

13. Disability Support Services: Reasonable accommodations are available for students who have documented temporary or permanent disabilities. All accommodations must be approved through Disability Support Services (885-6307; dss@uidaho.edu; www.uidaho.edu/dss) located in the Idaho Commons Building, Room 306 in order to notify your instructor(s) as soon as possible regarding accommodation(s) needed for the course.

See the course schedule/syllabus below, with expectation that you complete the assigned reading(s) for each day prior to class! I realize that our pace will at times put stress upon completing all of the assigned reading--the basic condition is that we do substantial work each week as we move through the semester.

Dates	Tuesday	Thursday	Notes
1/15		Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. with introduction by Cathy Caruth. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins UP, 1995. [Preface, Intro, pp. vii-12; Recapturing the Past: Introduction, pp. 151-157; in class: Death and the Maiden film excerpt
1/20-22	Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996). [PDFs for Introduction, pp. 1-8; Ch. 1, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History/Freud, Moses and Monotheism, pp. 10-24; Inquiry-Starter due (Bblearn); if possible, read Ariel Dorfman's play Death and the Maiden (Bblearn); Note: extended excerpt from Freud's Moses and Montheism is available in PDF via Bblearn folder on Freud; Jake initiate/lead discussion	Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. [Ch. 5, Traumatic Awakenings (Freud, Lacan, and the Ethics of Memory) pp. 91-112]; Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. [Introduction to Part I, pp. 3-11; rec: Ch. 1, pp. 12-29; Introduction to Part II, pp. 81-87; Conclusion, pp. 161-162. Note: Caruth references texts of Freud and Lacan--these are included in the respective Bblearn folders on Freud and Lacan: Caruth comments on Ch. 5 from Lacan's Seminars, Bk. XI, and she comments on Ch. 7 of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams--these texts are included for your reference but are not required reading!
1/27-29	Caruth, Cathy. Literature in the Ashes of History (2013). [Ch. 1 Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival]; Sigmund Freud, excerpt from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Preface and pp. 3-17 (in Literary Theory: An Anthology (2004). 431-437.) Note: for basic introductory/review material on both Freud and Lacan, see PDF transcripts of Paul Fry's lectures in the Freud and the Lacan folders in Bblearn; Inquiry-Starter due (in addition to choice of focusing your IS on today's Caruth/Freud texts, you could choose instead to focus on Whitehead, because we did not manage to discuss her work last Thursday); Dustin initiate/lead discussion	Caruth, Cathy. Literature in the Ashes of History. [Ch. 4, Disappearing History: Scenes of Trauma in the Theater of Human Rights/Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden, pp. 55-74; Afterword, pp. 75-92]; Note: for a basic review/introduction to psychoanalysis and literary study, see Robert Dale Parker's chapter 5 in his How To Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. Third edition (2015), via PDF on our Bblearn course site.
2/3-5	New reading assignments (PDFs in Misc. Theory folder) to give us some foundation in poststructuralism/deconstruction: Derrida, Jacques. "Différance"; Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, "Introductory Deconstruction"; Habib, M.A.R. chapter on "The Era of Poststructuralism (I): Later Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction" ; if you have time, you might look at Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" and see the last page or so of "Semiology and Grammatology"--you may find that reading Rivkin and Ryan and some or all of Habib before tackling Derrida's "Différance" or anything else of Derrida is helpful Now Optional/future if you want more of Caruth, Cathy. Literature in the Ashes of History. [Ch. 2, The Claims of the Dead: History, Haunted Property, and the Law/Honoré de Balzac, Colonel Chabert, pp. 18-35; Honoré de Balzac, Colonel Chabert	Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question (2008). Introduction (1-15); Part 1 Aetiology: 1. The genealogy of a concept (19-76), includes Trauma and modernity (20); The law of ‘nervous shock’ (26); Trauma and psychology 1870-1914 (34); Trauma in war ecology: Shell shock (49); Trauma and the politics of identity: Vietnam, Holocaust and abuse survivors (59); Inquiry-Starter due; Myles initiate/lead discussion
2/10-12	Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Part II: Cultural Symptoms. 2. Trauma in Narrative Fiction, includes Beloved: A paradigmatic trauma fiction (90), Stephen King’s trauma Gothic (97), Mainstream fiction and traumatic anachrony (105), W. G. Sebald: The last traumatophile? (111); Inquiry-Starter due; Caneseinitiate/lead discussion	Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. 3. My so-called life: The Memoir Boom, includes Five elements towards the trauma memoir (121), Memoir and the judicious truth (135), Generating autofictions: Philip Roth, Hervé Guibert, Kathryn Harrison (137); optional/rec.: excerpt from Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting LIfe Narratives. Second ed.
2/17-19	Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. 4. The intrusive image; Photography and trauma, includes The fine art of trauma (150), Aftermath aesthetics: Christian Boltanski, Gerhard Richter, Tracey Moffatt (154), Beautiful books of atrocity: Sebastião Salgado, Gilles Peress, Luc Delahaye (164); 5. Flashbacks, mosaics, and loops: Trauma and narrative cinema, includes A genealogy of the traumatic flashback (179), Three trauma auteurs: Alain Resnais, Atom Egoyan, David Lynch (185), Trauma and ‘post-classical’ film since 1990 (203); see additional resources in Bblearn folder on the intrusive image and film; Inquiry-Starter due; Ashley initiate/lead discussion	Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest (2014), Ch. I, The Zone of Interest (3-36); Concha, Ángeles de la. “’Strangers to ourselves’: Story-telling and the Quest for the Self in Martin Amis’s Trauma Fictions.” Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (2013). 127-143.
2/24-26	Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest, Ch. II, To Business (39-82); Ch. III, Grey Snow (85-137); Critical Analysis due (slight extension on due date: if you wish, you may place a hard copy of your Critical Analysis in my Brink 200 mailbox no later than 4:45pm Wednesday Feb. 25, without incurring a 'late' penalty);	Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest, Ch. IV, Brown Snow (141-198); Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995). 61-75. Suggested if time: Young, James E. "Between History and Memory: The Voice of the Eyewitness." Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. Eds. Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 275-283.
3/3-5	Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest, Ch. V, Dead and Alive (201-235); Ch. VI, Walpurgis Night (239-265); Aftermath (269-295); Acknowledgements and Afterward (299-306); read one or more of the 'book' reviews of Amis's novel, via weblinks in the Bblearn folder on The Zone of Interest	Belau, Linda. “Introduction Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through: Trauma and the Limit of Knowledge.” Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory (2002). xiii-xxvii; Belau, Linda. “Trauma, Repetition, and the Hermeneutics of Psychoanalysis.” Topologies of Trauma, 151-175. Inquiry-Starter due; Jason M. initiate/lead discussion
3/10-12	Brown, Laura S. “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995). 100-112. Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), Part I, Lambs (1-33); Inquiry-Starter due; Sally initiate/lead discussion	Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Part II, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (37-83)—class-led/mutual discussion--that is, come to class prepared to comment on particular passages and issues, and expect that everyone will have a chance to contribute in 'book club' fashion while I'm out of town
3/24-26	Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Part III, Land Under the Wave (87-123); Van der Kolk, Bessel A. and Alexander C. McFarlane. “The Black Hole of Trauma.” Literary Theory: An Anthology (2004). 487-502. Optional: McBride may remind you (one) of Joyce and Beckett--see brief excerpts on Bblearn from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and though Beckett's prose fiction would do, see on Bblearn his short dramatic piece Not I.	Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Part IV Extreme Unction (127-170); optional: check out : Crossley, Michele L. Introducing narrative psychology: Self, trauma, and the construction of meaning. Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open UP, 2000. [excerpts, see esp. Ch. 6 on surviving childhood sexual abuse--on Bblearn]
3/31-4/2	Eimear McBride, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Part V, The Stolen Child (173-227); Rothberg, Michael. “Preface: Beyond Tancred and Clorinda—trauma studies for implicated subjects.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary literary and cultural criticism (2014). xi-xviii.; Buelens, Gert, and Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone. “Introduction.” The Future of Trauma Theory. 1-8. Jamie initiate/lead discussion	Eaglestone, Robert. “Knowledge, ‘Afterwardness’ and the Future of Trauma Theory.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary literary and cultural criticism (2014). 11-21. Ganteau, Jean-Michel, and Susana Onega. “Introduction: Traumatic Realism and Romance in Contemporary British Narrative.” Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (2013). 1-13. Inquiry-Starter due; Kelsey initiate/lead discussion
4/7-9	Gibbs, Alan. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (2014). Introduction: The Trauma Paradigm and Its Discontents (1-44); also see Balaev, Michelle. The Nature of Trauma in American Novels (2012). [Introduction, pp. xi-xix; Ch. 1, Trauma Theory and Its Discontents: The Potentials of Pluralism, pp. 3-40]; Inquiry-Starter due; Jason S. initiate/lead discussion	Golden, Kristen Brown, and Bettina G. Bergo. “Introduction.” The Trauma Controversy: Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Dialogues (2009). 1-19. Beardsworth, Sara. "Overcoming the Confusion of Loss and Trauma: The Need of Thinking Historically" (45-69)
4/14-16	Gibbs’ Contemporary American Trauma Narratives, 1. Twentieth-Century Trauma Narratives: Some Paradigmatic Texts (45-84); Summary-Review and Critical Response due--post your summaries in separate threads for each summary, under the overall thread for summaries on Bblearn	Gibbs’ Contemporary American Trauma Narratives, 2. Traumatic Metafiction and Ontological Crisis (85-116)
4/21-23	Gibbs’ Contemporary American Trauma Narratives, 3. 9/11, Collective Trauma, and Postmodernist Responses (117-160);Hammad, Suheir. “first writing since.” Greenberg, Judith, ed. Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2003. 139-143;Rothberg, Michael. “’There Is No Poetry in This’: Writing, Trauma, and Home.” Greenberg, Judith, ed. Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2003. 147-157. Inquiry-Starter due	carry over discussion of Rothberg and Hammad; Gibbs’ Contemporary American Trauma Narratives, 4. Gulf War Memoirs and Perpetrator Trauma (161-200)
4/28-30	Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (2009); Letissier, Georges. “Hauntology as Compromise between Traumatic Realism and Spooky Romance in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger.” Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature (2013). 34-50. Also recommended: Parker, Emma. “The Country House Revisited: Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger.” Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2013). 99-113. And see: Germanà, Monica. “The Death of the Lady: Haunted Garments and (Re-) Possession in The Little Stranger.” Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2013).114-128.	Gibbs’ Contemporary American Trauma Narratives, 5. It Could Happen Here: Trauma and Contemporary American Counterfactuals (201-239); Conclusion (240-247)
5/5-7	Change of reading, shift from Craps to: Edkins, Jenny. “Time, Personhood, Politics.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 127-139. If you want, we also can discuss Craps, Stef. “Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma theory in the global age.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary literary and cultural criticism (2014). 45-61. A complementary? companion piece to these pieces is: Vermeulen, Pieter. “The Biopolitics of Trauma.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 141-155.	Let's read this as way to look back, recap where we 'started' with Freud: Roth, Michael S. Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past (2012). Ch. 7, Why Freud Still Haunts Us, pp. 117-124. Term Essay due: Note that the Term Essay is due in class on Thursday May 7; it may be turned in one day late on Friday without penalty, hard copy in my Brink Hall mailbox by 4:00pm, and it may be turned in as late as but no later than 4:00 pm on May 11 (with penalty of minus 5 points). I shall also draw upon a couple more pieces/excerpts from our Bblearn PDFs to talk about today, that have to do with findings in neuroscience and trauma: Specter, Michael. "Partial Recall: Can neuroscience help us to rewrite our most traumatic memories?" The New Yorker May 19, 2014; and from Kirmayer, Lemelson, Barad (folder on Bblearn with two PDFs).

From the literature of trauma--this gives you an idea of literature reviewed in determining selections for this semester:

Of the works below, Austerlitz, Fugitive Pieces, The Nature of Blood, and The Secret Scripture would have been other solid choices for the course (and sidestepping works of American literature, such as Morrison's Beloved or Erdrich's The Round House, mainly because other UI faculty teach those novels).
Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow (1991)--chilling intriguing backwards chronological narrative structure
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001)--austere, compelling--
Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)—first novel in a trilogy
Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014)--future reading--brutal episodes.
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture (2008)--fascinating interplay of perspectives, lyrical sweep of 100 years of Irish history

Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood (1997)--strong/ interplay of different periods/narrative story lines
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces: A Novel (1996)--poetic/lyrical
Schlink, Bernhard. The Reader. (1995)--provocative, compelling work.
Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)
Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis (2007, graphic novel, trans. 2004-2005)
Joe Sacco, Palestine (1996, two vol. graphic novel)--nonfiction/journalism
Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus (vol 1., 1973; vol. 2, 1986)--"classic" early graphic novel of the Holocaust and its aftermath

also see Miscellaneous Theory folder on our class site in Bblearn, which includes introductions to Psychoanalytic theory and post-structuralism, as well as some key texts by Derrida and others

Examples of past general introductions to theory courses, at undergrad and grad level:

More to browse . . . .
Tompkins, Jane. "A Short Course in Post-Structuralism." College English 50.7 (1988): 733-47.[access this from UI network/computers]

In February 1991, the eight-member National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, established in 1990 by then-President Patricio Aylwin, released its report. The Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation is popularly known as the Rettig Report for former Senator Raul Rettig, president of the commission. Other members of the commission were Jaime Castillo Velasco, Jose Luis Cea Egaña, Mónica Jiménez de la Jara, Laura Novoa Vásquez, José Zalaquett Daher, Ricardo Martín Díaz, and Gonzalo Vial Correa. The commission's mandate encompassed human rights abuses resulting in death or disappearance during years of military rule beginning on September 11, 1973 and ending on March 11, 1990.

Sources: BBC Summary of World Broadcasts 03/06/1991;Los Angeles Times 09/07/1990; Esteban Cuya, " Las Comisiones de la Verdad en America Latina. " http://www.derechos.org/koaga/iii/1/cuya.html (March 1, 1999).

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For an indication of current/scholarly interest in this topic, see that there’s a research center at the Ghent University [excerpt from their website below]:

http://www.litra.ugent.be
at Ghent University brings together scholars from various departments in the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy whose research revolves around traumatic memory and its representation in literary texts.
A cursory glance through the trend-setting literary studies journals of recent years suffices to establish that the relationship between literature and trauma is among the hottest research topics in the field today. LITRA sets out to examine the possibilities and limits of the concept of trauma as a tool for literary analysis by focusing on the following thematic areas: