Professor: Nicole Rizzuto
Trauma and the Politics of Witnessing
This course investigates how recent theories of trauma and testimony that focus on the Holocaust
and European literature might be productive for reading Anglophone literature from Britain, the
Caribbean, Zimbabwe, and South Africa that stage different historical events as traumas. How
might these literary works in turn revise, question, or displace theoretical models that have
developed largely around one specific traumatic event in the twentieth century? By bringing these
literary and theoretical discourses into conversation, we will explore how the topos of trauma
raises ethico-political questions of reading in a global age. How might literary works articulate
colonialism, revolution, apartheid, occupation, or migration as occluded events that produce
crises in witnessing? What kinds of demands are placed on literary language, and on the reader, to
bear witness as a consequence? Topics under consideration include: formal versus thematic
articulations of the traumatic; testimony as crisis and event of translation; trauma as trans-national
and trans–cultural displacement; autobiographical utterance as the supplement and the
confounding of collective memory; and attestation as a condition of possibility and aporia of
forgiveness. Some background, or interest, in psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and/or
philosophy is recommended. Theoretical works by Freud, Lyotard, Derrida, de Man, Felman,
Caruth, Leys, Agamben, Blanchot, La Capra, Fanon, Glissant, Ngugi. Literary works by Joseph
Conrad, E.M. Forster, Bessie Head, Jean Rhys, George Lamming, Zoe Wicomb, and J.M.
Coetzee.
All books, with the exception of Under Western Eyes and David’s Story are available at the NYU
bookstore. All other material is available on Blackboard, under “Course Documents.” Because
this class is organized around close readings, PURCHASE ONLY THE EDITIONS LISTED
BELOW.
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, WW Norton & CO
Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Stanford U.P.
On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Routledge
Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, U. of Nebraska Press
La Capra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Johns Hopkins U.P.
****Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, Oxford University Press
E. M. Forster, Passage to India, Harvest
Bessie Head, A Question of Power, Heinemann
Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark, W. W. Norton & Co.
George Lamming, The Emigrants, U. Of Michigan Press
***Zoe Wicomb, David’s Story, Feminist Press at CUNY
Coetzee, Disgrace, Penguin