123044 PS Proseminar Literature / Literary Studies (2015S)

Whether private or public, personal or political, trauma is a complex experience that always affects our psyches, our bodies, but also the way in which we inhabit the present, space, and the polis at large. In this course, we will investigate language´s capacity to articulate pain, the narrative strategies employed by writers to communicate what since the 1990s has been theorised as enigmatically ‘aporetic’, ‘unspeakable’, and ‘unrepresentable’. We will address difficult questions of memory and forgetting, of life and death, as well as the potential for renewal, horizons of hope, and futurity. Within this context, we will read key theoretical texts by Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, Viktor Frankl, Shoshana Felman, Giorgio Agamben and Dori Laub.
If critics have mostly read this phenomenon symptomatically, that is mainly through the rubric of language – thereby always foregrounding questions of ethics and representation –, in this class, we will put to the test other rubrics of trauma such as time, affect, space and embark on more phenomenological modes of reading – new critical pedagogies through which we will attempt to grasp and imagine what has been deemed unbearable and unthinkable.