Senior Seminar Offerings for Spring 2012
Who is the monster, who are the monstrous?" The answer is that most of us are the monstrous, unless or until we are confronted by one of nature's true casualties. The monster is least monstrous of all.” —Charles Champlin Required texts: MWF 11 a.m. Why study the literature of trauma in a post-9/11 world?
T R 4 p.m.
Dr. Mary Wright
Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer
Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
Edward Ingebretsen, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King
This Senior Seminar focuses on the broad topic of monster narratives, pervasive throughout oral and written texts, which exposes (celebrates) the “freaks” and “weirdos” that exist at the centers and margins of the cultures of all pre-literate and literate peoples. Because the rhetoric of monstrosity is a social strategy designed to police behavior and purge what it identifies as evil, the monster can be traced throughout history and literature coiled at the pit of any cautionary tale, an unseen entity ready to strike the innocent and fearful. To examine the narrative formula reveals cultures contemplating loss, beset with anxieties and fantasies, obsessed with the rhetoric of terror, and adept at using the discourse of monstrosity as a social tool, a sanctioned way to promote racism, homophobia, sexism, and religious intolerance.
Dr. Jean Filetti
Required Readings:
Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Eli Wiesel’s Night
Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone
Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina
Ghassan Kanafani’s All That’s Left to You
The course title comes from Dominick LaCapra’s theoretical distinction between writing about trauma, which is reconstructing the past objectively and is the realm of history, and writing trauma, which “indicates some distance from trauma [ . . . ] . Trauma indicates a shattering break or cesura in experience which has belated effects. Writing trauma [ . . . ] involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to the past—processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experience,’ limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different combinations and hybridized forms” (Writing History, Writing Trauma 186).
Course readings include both fiction and nonfiction accounts of trauma and discussion will cohere around such questions as the following:
In what ways is the literature of trauma a marginalized literature?
What purpose does recounting the horror serve? Are these purposes the same for the survivor and for society?
How might trauma be further interrogated by examining the roles of perpetrators, collaborators, profiteers, bystanders, resisters, rescuers, and those who fall into what Primo Levi calls, “a gray zone, poorly defined, where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge,” a reference to “the prisoner-functionary,” the Jewish prisoner, for example, who, albeit a victim, turned on other prisoners and became a perpetrator? (The Drowned and the Saved, 42).
Regarding trauma, what is ethical to tell and who should do that telling?
What does it mean to survive trauma?
Who is the survivor’s audience?
In what ways does the survivor’s sense of community shape his or her testimony?
How is the survivor’s account accessed and influenced by the non-traumatized reader?
What messages in our society conspire to keep the survivor’s voice silent?
