This seminar will address literary representations of human suffering. Contributors are encouraged to explore how Anglophone literatures from a variety of cultures and historical eras pay witness both to individual forms of suffering and to more cultural or collective practices relating to times of war, the global pandemic or the looming ecological collapse.
Aristotle’s Poetics, which stands at the beginning of Western discourse on tragedy, asserts that drama without suffering cannot be tragic. Yet, whereas for Aristotle the suffering of lowly-ranked individuals is of no importance, the novel goes on to subvert such established hierarchies, opening a space for the general human suffering (David B. Morris, ‘About Suffering: Voice, Genre and Moral Community’, 1996). Suffering thus becomes both individual and social as it opens up the Western canon to minority figures.
In terms of individual suffering, recent research has shown that prolonged suffering can result in the establishment of a ‘new self’. For example, Catherine Malabou re-examines Freud by using psychoanalysis and neuroscience (The New Wounded, 2012). According to Malabou, our new understanding of the brain renders Freud’s understanding of sexuality as the cause of psychological dysfunction unnecessary and revises our understanding of the injured subject. In terms of social suffering, we can speak about different conditions that ‘simultaneously involve health, welfare, legal, moral and religious issues’ (Veena Das; Margaret Lock, Social Suffering, 1997) where the grouping of social problems transcends the individual and points to the close linkage of personal and social problems.
In the last couple of decades established trauma theory has suffered a series of discontents, and this seminaraccordingly seeks to move beyond Caruth’s well-established reading of trauma as an overwhelming experience which resists integration and expression. It will question genealogies which seek to limit trauma to phenomena historically situated after the introduction of the modern, psychological usage of the term in the 1860s. What, for instance, is the connection between trauma and older concepts for suffering such as tragedy, melancholia, nostalgia and Angst? Further, this seminar will seek to expose the trauma theory’s Eurocentric biases to show that the local is implicated in the global and that ethical responses to suffering need a wider, global approach. This is in accordance with how the title of the seminar invokes Anglophone literatures, reflecting our hope to include global writing in English and give voice to minority traumas. According to Stef Craps (in Postcolonial Witnessing, 2013), what we need is a decolonized, at once inclusive and culturally sensitive, trauma theory which can act as a catalyst for meaningful change, and also papers addressing this challenge are welcome.
In general, binaries such as fact vs. fiction, hegemonic vs. marginalized, and narrative vs. non-narrative memory may be interrogated. By using an interdisciplinary approach, the seminar revisits trauma theory and sets up new perspectives on literary representations of human suffering.
Convenors:
Charles Ivan Armstrong
University of Agder
Norway
Martina Domines Veliki
University of Zagreb
Croatia