Little has been said in trauma studies about the ability or inability of traumatized characters depicted by traumatized writers to recover accounts of self from the aseptic reiterations of a language unable to articulate the unspeakable event of trauma. This paper argues that Cathy Caruth's recent emphasis upon a "language of ashes"-derived from a "language of the life drive" departing from a "language of the death drive"-provides a framework for examining the extent to which traumatized textualities are able to apprehend their seeming enervating repetitions of the death drive as textual constructs able to be written on and read. I posit that the literary characters in the fictions of Ingeborg Bachmann and W. G. Sebald occupy opposing ends of the ambit of the life and death drives, and aver that the contrasting ways they perform the repetitiveness of personal and/or national trauma come close to enacting, respectively, the languages of the "death drive" and the "life drive". I demonstrate the extent to which they are able to extricate the language used from their singular historical experiences of trauma. In this way, I argue that Caruth's attempt to identify the site within history where trauma can be creatively animated sets a productive framework for examining how trauma can either metabolize an individual into foreclosing the world, or create a continuing dialogue with loss for the unfolding of a world-in-becoming.

Crossings: A Journal of English Studies

Trauma involves a rupture in the temporal and symbolic orders at individual and collective levels. Fictional representation of trauma, therefore, is marked by a problem of referentiality, where mimesis fails and chronology breaks down. The article opens with a discussion on the disorientation in the co-ordinative links between the world, the self, and representational tools in the event of a traumatic experience, which results in the crisis of referentiality. The inadequacy of language as a representational medium on the one hand, and unacknowledgement of extreme events beyond “socially validated reality” on the other, constitute two of the major issues creative artists have to deal with. An extreme event leaves a mnemonic gap in the psyche of the traumatized individual, and the process of recovery involves the gap being filled in with narrative memory, suggesting an epistemological void. Narrative memory acts as the surrogate memory of the traumatic event, which is unavailable to w...

KnE Social Sciences, 2018

Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History and Kali Tal's Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma sparked a great attention to literature lovers. Her suggestion on Trauma Theory enlightens a new era in poststructral approach of analyzing literary texts. Slowly but gradually, several models were introduced which inherent neurobiological features of trauma that refuse representation and cause dissociation were significant to arguments that sought to emphasize the extent of profound suffering from an external source, whether that source is an individual perpetrator or collective social practice. It was quickly accompanied by alternative models and methodologies that revised this foundational claim to suggest determinate value exists in traumatic experience. However, the researcher would like to explore and reintroduce Trauma Theory in more contemporary approach so that it will be acceptable and practical in all genres of literature. Similarly, this study is in line with the critics such as Leys and Cvetkovich who establish a psychological framework apart from the classic model thus produce different conclusions regarding trauma's influence upon language, perception, and society. The researcher believes that Trauma Theory should be viewed in a larger conceptual framework rather than the social psychology theories in addition to neurobiological theories; that is in the view of Critical Thinking. This stance might therefore consider dubious the assertion of trauma's intrinsic dissociation. The discussion focuses more on the roles of Critical Thinking in supporting Trauma Theory in several selected poems. In conclusion, the findings might prove that Critical Thinking and Trauma Theory can be blended together in developing learners' intellectuality and maturity in analyzing and appreciating literary texts.

LITERATURE, NARRATIVE and TRAUMA, 2019

This article analyses how the basic qualities and components of the short story genre enable the portrayal of personal trauma in consequence of collective trauma.

Critical Trauma Studies, 2016

ESJ, 2018

The question of adequate representation through words, of a proper correlation between object and word, signifier and signified, has always been at the forefront in literary studies. This conundrum has acquired new dimensions in the last century, due to the traumatic events that marked it and led to an irrepressible need to confess and bear witness, in fictional as well as in non-fictional form. This dimension of trauma has unsettled the relationship between what words are taken to represent and the reality they stem from, as well as the very possibility of putting in words certain realities denoting unspeakable individual or collective trauma. After a short theoretical introduction into the concept of trauma, the present essay will seek to analyse a number of instances, from prose, poetry and non-fiction writings, which exemplify the various dimensions of the difficulty of talking about trauma.

Trauma involves a rupture in the temporal and symbolic orders at individual and collective levels. Fictional representation of trauma, therefore, is marked by a problem of referentiality, where mimesis fails and chronology breaks down. The article opens with a discussion on the disorientation in the co-ordinative links between the world, the self, and representational tools in the event of a traumatic experience, which results in the crisis of referentiality. The inadequacy of language as a representational medium on the one hand, and unacknowledgement of extreme events beyond " socially validated reality " on the other, constitute two of the major issues creative artists have to deal with. An extreme event leaves a mnemonic gap in the psyche of the traumatized individual, and the process of recovery involves the gap being filled in with narrative memory, suggesting an epistemological void. Narrative memory acts as the surrogate memory of the traumatic event, which is unavailable to willed recollection. This surrogate memory is compared to Jean Baudrillard's third order of simulation, where a false presence conceals the absence of any basic reality. Recognizing the referential and representational crises at work in rendering traumatic experiences in fiction, the article goes on to explore the ways of bypassing them and discuss the idea of indirect representation in Michael Rothberg's Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Rothberg believes that an oblique rendition of traumatic events in fiction may be an appropriate representational mode within the conflicting demands of the documentation of reality, meditation on the formal limits by the creative artist, and risky circulation of images in the globalized world. This leads to a deliberation on Anne Whitehead and Laurie Vickroy's idea of the emerging genre of " trauma fiction " with its thematic and stylistic concerns. The article ends with a summary of the representational techniques likely to feature in fictions written on violent events.

Literary trauma studies is a rapidly developing field which examines how literature deals with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such historical and current phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides, 9/11, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments. It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma. Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to fur...

American Journal of Psychotherapy

I try to make the ghosts within me speak. (1, p. 143) The forms of dissociation are multiplex and must include a type of dissociation that represents human beings' fundamental inability to process and represent severe trauma. This article posits a form of dissociation-resulting from trauma-linked to disastrous knowledge, signifying a person s incapacity to use language and symbol to organize the core of the traumatic experience in terms of semantically structured self-in-relation. Catastrophic knowledge of severe trauma is unexperienced experience that paradoxically stands for an indescribable core of an event that undermines selfin-relation and the concomitant capacities for language, narrative, and knowledge. This irretrievable unexperienced experience continues to haunt despite a person s recovery. This perspective points to the limits of therapy and the necessity to establish and maintain a relationship of trust and loyalty in the face of an event that annihilates selfin-relation. Included in this work are the therapeutic tasks of serving as a witness and a container of the unnamable horror. In a person's telling of a trauma "what remains to be said is the disaster. Ruin of words, demise of writing" (2, p. 33) for both the speaker and listener. This ruin of words, this sense of being defeated by the disaster is embedded, paradoxically, in the very act of speaking. It is the catastrophe of trauma that undercuts our attempts to organize and communicate experience through our stories, theories, and models. Therapist and patient struggle to understand, though there "is no reaching the disaster" (2, p. 1). And yet the very act of speaking and responding intends, affirms, and confirms continuity and community that, to use Blanchot's phrase, the very "knowledge of the disaster" undercuts. This is to say that the efforts to narrate experiences of severe trauma move listener and narrator to the edge of the abyss of a disaster that is "unexperienced experience"experiences lost to, and outside of, communion and community. It is this