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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: Wednesdays: 10:00 ～ 12:00; Thursdays: 13:00 ～ 15:00
Office : Hsiu-chi Building, Room 26628
Telephone: 06-2757575 ext 52255 e-mail: zhuli@mail.ncku.edu.tw
Course Requirements: participation and presentation: 10%; Homework One: 15%;
Homework Two: 15%; Final Paper: 60 %
Tentative Syllabus (subject to revision):
Week Month Day Reading Homework
Introduction
Trauma Theories
Trauma Theories
17
24
1
8
15
22
29
26
3
10
17
5
12
19
29
31
7
14
Trauma Theories
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Art, Spiegelman, Maus
Art, Spiegelman, Maus
Art, Spiegelman, Maus
No class
Term Paper Presentation
Term Paper due
Hw#1 due
Hw #2 due
Additional notes:
1.
The minimum page requirement for the homework is 2 pages (1.5-line spacing). You are required to submit your homework to NCKU online classroom (http:.//iteach.ncku.edu.tw) before the class begins on Wednesday. Please note that reading notes submitted after
9:00am will not be accepted, nor will their credit be honored. You are, therefore,

encouraged to be always on time.
2.
Your term paper must be 12 to 15 pages long (MA students) and 15 to 20 pages long (PhD students). Please comply with MLA style requirements.
3.
Finally, plagiarism of any kind is a sin. Please use your own discretion to avoid putting me in a difficult position of having to fail you.
Weeks 1 (9/17): Introduction: Trauma and Memory
Week 2 (9/24): Psychoanalysis, Memory, and Trauma
Toni Morrison, “Recitatif,” in Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume E.
Cathy Caruth, “Trauma and Memory,” in The Holocaust.
Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absense, Loss,” in The Holocaust.
Eric Santner, “History Beyond the Please Principle,” in The Holocaust.
Recommended
Victoria Burrows, “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.
Week 3 (10/1): Historicizing Trauma
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay (New York:
Norton, 1989), 584-589.
Cathy Caruth, “Introduction: The Wound and the Voice,” Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative
and History, (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 1-9.
James Berger, “Trauma and the End of the World,” After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse
(Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P, 1999), 19-55.
Recommended:
Laplanche, J. et al. selections from The Language of Psychoanalysis (e-file)
Week 4 (10/8): Ethics of Trauma
Cathy Caruth, “Traumatic Awakenings: Freud, Lacan and the Ethics of Memory,” Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996),
91-112. (e-file)
Laub, Doris. “Bearing Witness on the Vicissitudes of Listening,” (e-file)
Recommended:
Žižek, Slavoj. “Melancholy and the Act,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 657-81. (e-file)

Weeks 5-7 (10/15; 10/22; 10/29): Toni Morrison, Beloved.
Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/morrison90.pdf
Mae G. Henderson, excerpt from A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory. Eds. Peter
Brooker & Peter Widdowson (London & New York; Prentice Hall, )
Homi Bhabha, excerpt from A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory.
Peter Nicholls, excerpt from A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory.
Jacqueline Rose, from States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon: 1996)
Recommended:
Avery Gordon, “Not Only the Footprints but the Water too and What is Down There” Ghostly
Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997),
137-190.
Ashraf Rushdy, “Rememory: Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrison’s Novels,”
Contemporary Literature 31:3 (1990): 300-323. (e-file)
J. Brooks Bouson, “‘Whites Might Dirty Her All Right, but Not Her Best Thing’: The Dirtied and Traumatized Self of Slavery in Beloved,” Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the
Novels of Toni Morrison (Albany: State U of New York, 2000), 131-162.
Weeks 8-9 (11/5; 11/12): Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
Jarraway, David R. “‘Excremental Assault’ in Tim O’Brien: Trauma and Recovery in Vietnam
War Literature.” Modern Fiction Studies 44.3 (1998): 695-711.
Recommended:
Heberle, Mark A. A Trauma Artist: Tim O’Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam. Iowa City: U of Iowa P,
2001.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--from Domestic Abuse to Political
Terror. New York: Basic, 1997.
Weeks 10-12 (11/19; 11/26; 12/3): Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Maslan, Mark. “The Faking of the Americans: Passing, Trauma, and National Identity in Philip
Roth’s Human Stain,” Modern Language Quarterly 66.3 (2005): 365-89.
Parrish, Tim. “Becoming Black: Zuckerman’s Bifurcating Self in The Human Stain,” Philip Roth:
New Perspectives on an American Author. Ed. Derek Parker Royal. Westport, Connecticut
& London: Praeger, 2005. 209-23.
Recommended:
Peiffer, Kathleen. Race Passing and American Individualism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P,
2002.

Shostak, Debra. Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives. U of South Carolina, 2004.
Weeks 13-15 (12/10; 12/17; 12/24): Art Spiegelman, Maus
Leventhal, Robert S. “Art Spiegelman’s MAUS: Working-Through The Trauma of the
Holocaust,” http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/holocaust/spiegelman.html
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.
Van Alphen, Ernst. “Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and
Postmemory,” Poetics Today 27.2 (2006): 473-88.
Recommended:
Efraim Sicher, “The Future of the Past: Countermemory and Postmemory in Contemporary
Post-holocaust Narratives,” History & Memory 12.2 (2000): 56-91. (e-file)
Doherty, Thomas. “Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust.” American Literature
68.1 (March 1996): 69-84.
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.
Week 16 (12/31): national holiday (no class)
Weeks 17 (1/7): student presentation
Week 18 (1/14): term paper due