ENG357H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Semiotics, Mutual Exclusion, Neurosis
Document Summary
Last week: wwi constructed (in canadian narratives) as a western perspective. Boyden getting us to reconceptualize our idea of the war, and our idea of trauma. Event that impacts the individual, creates certain responses to identity. Implications on the way that we construct identity and ourselves. Catastrophe and wound are generally what we associate with trauma. Mental wound: forms of dissociation, a splitting of the conscious mind: defense mechanism. Usually a delayed response: trauma happens later (after the event). Too overwhelming to be processed at the time. Rede ned during rst and second world wars, and vietnam war (shell-shock). Current literary theorists have picked up on the idea of trauma. Theorists primarily doing it within a western model (e. g. freud). Patrick j bracken points to this tendency in trauma discourses: theorists say that forms of mental disorder found and described in the west are (basically) the same as those found elsewhere. We assume that elsewhere it will be the same.
