Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered

Abstract

The field of trauma studies in literary criticism gained significant attention in 1996 with the publication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History and Kali Tal’s Worlds of Hurt Reading the Literatures of Trauma.1 Early scholarship shaped the initial course of literary trauma theory by popularizing the idea of trauma as an unrepresentable event. A theoretical trend was introduced by scholars like Caruth, who pioneered a psychoanalytic poststructural approach that suggests trauma is an unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language. This Lacanian approach crafts a concept of trauma as a recurring sense of absence that sunders knowledge of the extreme experience, thus preventing linguistic value other than a referential expression. For Caruth’s deconstructive criticism in particular, the model allows a special emphasis on linguistic indeterminacy ambiguous referentiality and aporia.2 The unspeakable void became the dominant concept in criticism for imagining trauma’s function in literature. This classic model of trauma appealed to a range of critics working outside of poststructuralism as well due to the notion of trauma’s irreversible damage to the psyche. The assumed inherent neurobiological features of trauma that refuse representation and cause dissociation were significant to arguments that sought to emphasize the extent of profound suffering from an external source, whether that source is an individual perpetrator or collective social practice.3