English Language and Literature Commons^™

Gender And Trauma From World War I To The War In Iraq: Narrative In The Aftermath Of Loss, Jenny Young Kijowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trauma Studies is predicated on the idea of unspeakability: events that are experienced as deep psychic wounds break the frameworks for understanding, resulting in an inability to translate the experience into language. Scholars who study the literature of trauma are thus faced with this central paradox: how do writers speak the unspeakable? Trauma literature is generally regarded as texts that not only are thematically centered on a traumatic event or series of traumatic events, but also structurally reflect the symptoms of trauma. Thus the formal qualities of trauma narratives include fragmentation, contradiction, repetition, circularity, and intrusion, such that these texts …