During the course of the 1990s, trauma studies emerged as one of the dominant schools of theory in the US academy. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, but also influenced by the codification of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the wake of the Vietnam War and the crisis of deconstruction in the wake of the Heidegger and de Man scandals, trauma studies proposed new ways of thinking about the relationship of theory to history, memory, subjectivity, experience, and ethics, among other keywords of contemporary discourse. Almost as soon as it emerged, however, trauma theory was subject to withering critique on a variety of grounds by feminist, queer, and left theorists. This summer seminar for faculty and graduate students will take up the question of trauma as a multidisciplinary object of inquiry, and will explore the formation of trauma studies as well as its critique. Besides exploring the relationship of trauma to the keywords mentioned about, this seminar will have a particular focus on trauma’s possibilities for galvanizing, polarizing, creating, or destroying community.

This seminar will be led by Ted Gournelos (gournelo@uiuc.edu) and Michael Rothberg (mpr@uiuc.edu), and will meet regularly between late June and mid- August. There is a possibility of independent study credit for graduate students.

Possible texts include: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience and Trauma: Explorations in Memory; LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma; Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy; Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism; Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision; Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings; and essays by such figures as Hal Foster, Mark Seltzer, Patricia Yaeger, Walter Benn Michaels, Amy Hungerford, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, and Geoffrey Hartman.