English
ENGL 7351: ST:Trauma,Memory,& Contemp Lit
Seminar - 4 credits
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- Topics in Literary Study - Trauma, Memory, and Contemporary Literature: This course explores how contemporary literature addresses itself to trauma, and the practice and process of memory.
- How does contemporary literature express trauma, and how has it been shaped by it?
- Across a range of genres—and including works about racism, illness, slavery, the Holocaust, and recent wars—we will examine how literary-artistic form can express, conceptualize, and hold the knowledge of trauma, whether in novels, graphic novels, memoir, poetry, or film.
- We will also look closely the question of the function and role of memory in literature, thinking about collective and cultural memory, in addition to anchoring ourselves in contemporary theories of trauma and event.
- Recent controversial public writing (as by Parul Sehgal on trauma and Philip Gourevitch on the value of memory) will also be considered.
- Works may include novels such as Morrison’s Beloved, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, and Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo; graphic novels such as Spiegelman’s Maus, Sacco’s The Fixer, Martínez and Hall’s Wake, and Czerwiec’s Taking Turns; experimental poetry by Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine, and film such as Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Topics in Literary Study - Trauma, Memory, and Contemporary Literature: This course explores how contemporary literature addresses itself to trauma, and the practice and process of memory. Show more.