Passage Discussion and AnalysisTrauma Theory

By Amy, Billy, Constance, Doris, Melody, Tiffany and Willa

Passage We Choose (1)

For some critics, such as Cathy Caruth, one of its most influential proponents, trauma theory provides a way of reconciling epistemological problems that follow in the wake of the Holocaust with a version of history, and so also of answering the charge that the focus on the materiality of language, associated with deconstruction, is negligently ahistorical.

http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/images/Trauma.gif

Passage We Choose (2)For Caruth, what is most significant about

Freud’s nightmare-stricken soldiers from Beyond Pleasure Principle is the insistent return of what she terms “the literal” in their dreams: it is this returning literalness, she argues, “which thus constitutes trauma and points to its enigmatic core; the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even seeing, an overwhelming occurrence that then remains, in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event.”

http://www.youthchg.com/crycut.jpg

Passage We Choose (3)The historical truth of trauma, hence, is

contained in its belatedness (what Freud called latency), as what is referenced by trauma is the moment, so to speak, when history is missed. History, thus, in its traumatic form, “can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence.” What war writing, in a very broad sense, does for Caruth is perform this inaccessibility so that it is in the paradoxes of language itself that we can rediscover the force of trauma and the imperative for a new form of historical witnessing.

http://www.writehisanswer.com/Trauma%20Zone%20resized.jpg

Passage We Choose (4)

By “carrying that impossibility of knowing out of the empirical event itself,” Caruth concludes her introduction to the widely influential collection Trauma: Explorations in Memory, “trauma opens up and challenges us to a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of impossibility.”

http://www.councilonalcoholism.net/images/Trauma_Logo.jpg

Main Idea of the Passage

Belatedness

Paradoxes of language

Reexamination

http://news.xinhuanet.com/collection/2004-09/07/xinsrc_3920901071523262105515.jpg

Example – 921 Earthquake

921 Earthquake

Latency: Victims' Recall

Inaccessibility & Impossibility

http://p7.p.pixnet.net/albums/userpics/7/3/722873/48d4094737675.jpg

Thanks for listening!!!

http://isiria.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/war-trauma.jpg