654 - 01: Twentieth-Century Literature
Spring 2008
Meeting Times: T 04:00pm-06:45pm
Room: HM 220
Registration Number: 12873
Class Description:
This graduate seminar will focus on issues of "Trauma Narrative" in 20th-century British and American literature, with an emphasis on the modernist literary period. After a brief survey of contemporary theoretical texts on trauma and illness narrative, students will read and discuss literary texts by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, and Art Spiegelman. We will plan to consider a wide range of traumatic experiences--from bereavement and loss to madness, childhood sexual abuse, depression, illness, and physical injury. As Arthur Frank suggested in The Wounded Storyteller, pain has often served as inadvertent inspiration for art through the aegis of "scriptotherapy" in the interest of emotional reformulation and recovery.
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