UCOR-3400 : Narratives of Trauma

Trauma is a prevalent mode of remembering and writing history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What can literature of trauma teach us about the experience of bearing witness to, and giving testimonies of, trauma? As a Humanities and Global Challenges core course, we will foreground the close-textual analysis of literary texts in conversation with the historical, political, legal, and ideological contexts in which and about which they were written. Our focus on the literary representations of trauma will depend on what I consider to be the other major 'text' of the course: students' work with organizations that support war veterans, refugees, and the homeless in the context of Service Learning.