IAH 221C Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Historical Trauma, Wield, Pow Wow
24 Feb 2020
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Historical trauma disrupts the form of contemporary novels: Iah paper 3 notes: contemporary humanistic trauma theorists widely agree that the fundamental effect of trauma is the profound disruption of the narrative unity of life . In general, their conceptualization of what constitutes trauma and the structure of disruption goes like this: human life is made intelligible and thus meaningful through temporally organized, cohesive stories that we tell about ourselves, and through this process, master. The traumatized subject can"t tell a coherent story about her life: traumatic events interrupt the stories we tell about history and identity by introducing cognitively unassimilable circumstances of grand-scale horror or loss. In the powwow section of the novel especially, how does trauma disrupt the narrative: there there is a counternarrative (an alternative history) to a traumatic past. As such, the traumatic past is conveyed through personal, interiorized, and affectively saturated accounts of unredeemed historical injury (levy-hussen 197).
