Trauma Paper

2149 Words5 Pages

Statement of the Problem Trauma studies' growth can be accredited to its familiarity with the major enduring effects of traumatic experience on individuals. In stressing the suffering of different groups of marginalized peoples (for example, oppressed women, war veterans, victims of genocide, the sexually or physically abused, and the terminally ill), trauma studies focus on those whom are often forgotten. It emphasizes the significance of addressing the wounds of the psyche in order to recover. Cathy Caruth argues that trauma, rather than separating and dividing different peoples, "trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures" ("Trauma and Experience" 11). Petar Ramadanovic claims that literature is uniquely placed to perform …show more content…

Literature, in other words, because of its sensible and representational character, because of its figurative language, is a channel and a medium for a transmission of trauma which does not need to be apprehended in order to be present in a text or…in order to be witnessed. (19). Literature is central to trauma studies because it is a key mode to which trauma victims frequently take recourse in order to process their experiences. Furthermore, the intersection of trauma and fiction offers new avenues for the literary imagination. Anne Whitehead writes in her book Trauma Fiction that: Fiction itself has been marked or changed by its encounter with trauma. Novelists have frequently found that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterized by repetition and indirection. Trauma fiction overlaps with and borrows from both postmodern and postcolonial fiction in its self-conscious deployment of stylistic devices as modes of reflection or critique. (3) This suggests that literature may provide a valuable imaginary space for those who wish to explore the traumatic experiences of others and their impact on …show more content…

Tim O’Brien (William Timothy O’Brien Jr.) was born on October 1st, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota, spending his early life there until 1956, when he and his family moved to Worthington, Minnesota, near the Iowa border. His parents were both World War II veterans; his father was in the Navy, serving on a destroyer off the coasts of Okinawa and Iwo Jima during the two major Pacific campaigns; his mother was working in a hospital. O’Brien grew up listening to his father’s numerous personal war stories and had a traditional all-American childhood and adolescence, with baseball, girls, and high school

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