ENGL 523 (3)
STUDIES IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL LITERATURES AND CULTURE:
TRAUMA, ILLNESS AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Instructor: Janet MacArthur
Email: janet.macarthur@ubc.ca
Course Description:
Trauma is a death encounter which often radically alters individuals and societies. Each of the works on this course is written by a “wounded storyteller” or someone who has experienced trauma first-hand or through transgenerational transmission, and who has created a narrative of self in an attempt to repair the “hole” in self that trauma produces. We will apply trauma theory to auto/biographical representations of extreme experiences such as mental illness, chronic and/or terminal illness, visible and invisible physical disability, torture, privation, dislocation, and genocide.
Assignments:
- Seminar presentation (30%)
- Research Exercise (20%)
- Term Paper (50%)
Texts: (please note that while this is an extensive reading list, most of it is straightforward auto/biographical narrative)
-
Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar; excerpts from The Journals of Sylvia Plath -
Gilda Radner
It’s Always Something -
Margaret Edson
Wit -
Michael J. Fox
Lucky Man -
Nancy Mairs
Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled -
Christopher Reeve
Still Me -
Richard E. Peschel
When a Doctor Hates a Patient and Other Chapters in a Young Physician’s Life -
Primo Levi
The Drowned and the Saved -
Charlotte Delbo
Auschwitz and After -
Art Spiegelman
Maus I and Maus II -
Hans-Ulrich Treichel
Lost
Course Outline
Week 1 Auto/biography: genre and subgenres, particularly auto/pathography and autofiction; the subject and the self; testimonial and subjectivity; memory and the subject; introduction to theories of trauma; PTSD
Week 2 Trauma and othering; theories of otherness; mental illness as othering process; gender and mental illness; the split subject; panopticon; The Bell Jar
Week 3 Physical/visible disability; illness/disability as trauma; social stigmata; the social course of disability and disease; the body self; types of body selves; normativity; ableism; spatial othering; Waist High in the World; Still Me
Week 4 Disease, Dis/ease and Disrupted subjectivity; a short history of disease in the West; transformation/reformation/deformation; metanarratives of illness/disability; the voice of the body; curing and/or healing; addiction narrative (discovery/recovery); the “gift”; Lucky Man
Week 5 Suffering: illness/disease/disability and Western religion and philosophy; the “really real” of pain; social and religious strategies of containment/effacement of trauma and suffering; psychic numbing; psychic doubling; derealization; the dialogics of illness/disability/disease (excerpts from The Nazi Doctors; When a Doctor Hates a Patient and Other Chapters in a Young Physician’s Life)
Week 6 Death: the life/death binary; forms of life and death; the objectification/commodification of health care delivery; abjection; empathic response; palliation; the ethics of care; generosity; Wit; It’s Always Something
Week 7 Genocide: perpetrator, bystander, victim, rescuer; “survival”; race/ethnicity as pathology; the industrialization and commodification of murder; geographies of human identity; anus mundi; the loss of civil subjectivity; the shattering of forms; the shattering of self; food and self; the role of testimonial in re-membering the self; The Drowned and the Saved
Week 8 Trauma as a Caesura in the Self: the psychobiology of trauma; trauma and memory; the hole in memory; rigid ego boundaries; “survival” and anhedonia; gender and the Holocaust; Auschwitz and After
Week 9 The Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma; the second generation survivors; national legacies; the drowned perpretrator generation; the Israeli “porcupine”; the Americanization of the Holocaust; PTSD; guilt; grief; hauntings; postmemory; Maus I and Maus II
Week 10 The German Trauma; national PTSD; the inability to mourn; vaterliteratur; the ‘68ers and the work of grief; the uncanny; PTSD and the economic miracle; transgenerational transmission; cathecting; acting out; somatic reactions; haunting; Lost
Week 11 Review
Bibliography
Primary Sources:
(see list of “Texts” above)
Secondary Sources:
Bar On, Daniel. Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
---. Trauma: Explorations in Memory.
Couser, Thomas. Recovering Bodies.
Frank, Arthur W. At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness.
---. The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine, and How to Live.
---. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, Ethics.
Henderson, Saras, and Alan Petersen, ed. Consuming Health: The Commodification of Health Care.
Karpf, Anne. The War After: Living with the Holocaust.
Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition.
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma.
Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimony: The Ruins of Memory.
---. Using and Abusing the Holocaust.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other.
MacDonogh, Giles. After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation.
Mitscherlich, Alexander, and Margaret. The Inability to Mourn.
Nelson, Hilde Lindemann. Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair.
Raoul, Valerie et al, ed. Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma.
Sereny, Gitta. The German Trauma.
Van der Kolk, Bessel. Traumatic Stress.
Last reviewed 
6/6/2008 2:30:53 PM
