Trauma Narratives
Fall 2010
Shuli Chang
Course Description: This course introduces students to the core concepts, theories, and ideas
of trauma and explores the relevance of trauma for the constitution of gender, ethnic, cultural,
national, and even transnational identities. In the second half of the semester, we will try to
see whether we can “apply” these ideas and theories to better analyzing trauma narratives.
Office Hours: Tuesdays: 10:00-12:00; Wednesdays: 13:00-15:00
Office: Hsiu-chi Building, Room 26628
Telephone: 06-2757575 ext 52255
e-mail: zhuli@mail.ncku.edu.tw
Grading Policy : Participation & Presentation 30%; Midterm Paper: 30% ; Final Paper : 40%
Presentation and Paper Guidelines (here I basically follow Prof. Cook’s example):
Mid-Term Paper:
Term Paper:
Oral Reports:
3-4 pages in length for M.A. students
Dealing with at least one novel read in the course
Making use of at least two articles on the novel
Following MLA guidelines in matters of format and documentation
6-8 pages in length for M.A. students
Dealing with one or more novels dealt with in the course
Making use of at least four articles on the novel
Following MLA guidelines in matters of format and documentation
20-30 minutes in length
Accompanied by a brief (2-3 page) outline
Presented in the student’s own words, not read from the article
Focusing on the central argument of the article, not incidental details
Tentative Syllabus (subject to revision):
Week
1
2
3
Month
9
9
9
Day
15
22
29
4
5
6
10
10
10
6
13
20
Reading
Introduction
National Holiday; no class
Cynthia Ozick, “Shawl”; Toni Morrison,
“Recitatif”
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
7
8
9
10
11
11
27
3
10
Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir
Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Presentation
Burrows (Yu-wen)
Levine
Herbele
Jarraway
Silbergleid
Smith (Edward Wu)
Ashuri (Ted Song)
Mansfield (J. Matthews)
LaCapra
10
11
17
Art Spiegelman, Maus
11
11
24
12
13
12
12
1
8
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Mid-term paper due
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
14
15
12
12
15
22
16
12
29
17
18
1
1
5
12
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Deepa Mehta, Earth (available on
youtube)
Deepa Mehta, Earth (available on
youtube)
Term Paper presentations
Term Paper presentations
Term paper due 1/13
Hirsch (Shu-hua Chen)
Leventhal
Sicher
Huyssen (Ted Song)
Ferguson (Shu-hua Chen)
Scanlan (Edward Wu)
Spielman
Venn (Yu Wen)
Herman
Barenscott (J. Matthews)
Ozick and Morrison
Burrows, Victoria. “Conclusion: A Meditation on Silence,” Whiteness and Trauma: The
Mother-Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Toni Morrison
(New York: Palgrave, 2004), 160-171.
Levine, Michael G. “‘Toward an Addressable You’: Ozick’s The Shawl and the Mouth of the
Witness.” Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust. Ed. Marianne Hirsch & Irene
Kacandes. New York: MLA, 2004. 396-411.
Rosenberg, Meisha. “Cynthia Ozick’s Post-holocaust Fiction: Narration and Morality in the
Midrashic Mode,” Journal of the Short Story in English 32 (1999): n.p.
http://jsse.revues.org/index184.html. 11 September 2010.
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Gournelos, Ted. “Othering the Self: Dissonant Visual Culture and Quotidian Trauma in the
Unites States Suburbia.” Cultural Studies 9.4 (2009): 509-32.
Heberle, Mark A. “True War Stories.” A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of
Vietnam. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2001.177-215.
Jarraway, David R. “‘Excremental Assault’ in Tim O’Brien: Trauma and Recovery in
Vietnam War Literature.” Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (1998): 695-711.
Smith, Lorrie N. “‘The Things Men Do’: The Gendered Subtext in Tim O’Brien’s Esquire
Stories.” Critique 36.1 (1994): 16-40.
Ari Folman, Waltz With Bashir
Ashuri, Tamar. “I Witness: Re-presenting Trauma in and by Cinema,” The Communication
Review 13.3 (2010): 171-92.
Mansfield, Natasha. “Loss and Mourning Cinema’s ‘Language’ of Trauma in Waltz With
Bashir,” Wide Screen 1.2 (2010): 1-14. http://widescreenjournal.org 11 September 2010.
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Dominick LaCapra: "'Twas the Night before Christmas: Art Spiegelman's Maus", in:
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1998, 139-179.
Efraim Sicher, “The Future of the Past: Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary
Post-holocaust Narratives,” History & Memory 12.2 (2000): 56-91.
Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory.” Discourse 15.2
(Winter 1992-93): 3-29. Reprinted in her Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and
Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.
Huyssen, Andrea. “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno,” New German
Critique 81 (2000): 65-82.
Landsberg, Alison. “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a
Radical Politics of Empathy.” New German Critique 71(Spring-Summer 1997): 63-86.
Leventhal, Robert S. “Art Spiegelman’s MAUS: Working-Through the Trauma of the
Holocaust,” http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/holocaust/spiegelman.html
Levine, Michael G. "Necessary Stains: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Bleeding of History."
Considering Maus: Approaches to Art Spiegelman's 'Survivor's Tale' of the Holocaust.
Ed. Deborah R. Geis. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2003. 63-104.
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Ferguson, Jesse Patrick. “Violent Dis-Placements: Natural and Human Violence in Kiran
Desai's The Inheritance of Loss,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.2 (2009):
35-49.
Scanlan, Margaret. "Migrating from Terror: The Postcolonial novel after September 11,"
Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46.3 (2010). 11 Sep. 2010
Spielman, David Wallace. “‘Solid Knowledge’ and Contradictions in Kiran Desai’s The
Inheritance of Loss,” Critique 51 (2010):74–89.
Venn, Couze. “Identity, Diasporas and Subjective Change: The Role of Affect, the Relation to
the Other, and the Aesthetic,” Subjectivity 26 (2009) 26: 3–28.
Deepa Mehta’s Earth
Herman, Jeanette. “Memory and Melodrama: The Translational Politics of Deepa Mehta’s
Earth,” Camera Obscura 20.1 (2005): 117-47.
Barenscott, Dorothy. “‘This is our Holocaust’: Deepa Mehta’s Earth and the Question of
Partition Trauma,” Mediascape Spring 2006,
http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Spring06_ThisIsOurHolocaust.html