2023-2024 Academic Catalog

May 12, 2024

2023-2024 Academic Catalog

ENG 163 - Trauma Narratives

Contemporary society embodies a “trauma culture,” one in which the pervasiveness of trauma shapes our very subjectivity, according to numerous theorists who focus on issues of trauma. COVID-19, anti-Black racism, and sexual assault, embedded in the intersections of identity, race, and gender, impact our culture and cultural forms. Since narrative reconfigures our sense of the world, past and current trauma narratives are central to understanding these ubiquitous individual and global traumatic events and to healing them. Trauma narratives, however, turn on the paradox of the crisis of representing the unrepresentable or the difficulty of witnessing trauma: both trauma and narrativity converge within the limits of comprehensibility. To explore these narratives, we will employ an interdisciplinary approach to uncover embedded psychological ruptures in meaning and sociopolitical complications. This course will examine these narratives to understand how narrative discourse shapes and is shaped by violent and oppressive events; the ways in which we are implicated in various traumas; and the possibility of change generated by these narratives. For English majors, this course may satisfy the C-2 requirement. VE and D&I Perspectives. This course counts toward the WGS major or minor.

Prerequisites: IDND 018 or VE Placement

Course Designation/Attribute: VE, DI

Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually