This course provides an introduction to scholarly investigations of trauma, writing, and healing primarily from within the field of Composition Studies, while also introducing relevant scholarship in the allied fields of literary studies, cultural studies, psychology, media studies, and English education. It begins with an overview of a variety of disciplinary definitions of key terms trauma and trauma studies and then works to set these inquiries in conversation with relevant scholarship on healing and writing, both inside and outside of the classroom context. Readings and classroom discussions will include both theoretical underpinnings and pedagogical practices.
Student Learning Objectives:
As a graduate seminar in Composition and Rhetoric, the course is designed to broaden the student’s foundational understandings of Composition studies generally and studies in writing, healing, and trauma more specifically, as both a form of praxis and as part of the intellectual work of the humanities. This course will thereby enrich the student’s disciplinary knowledge in C/R and English studies as well as deepening the students’ understanding of disciplinary approaches to these terms in allied fields.
Required Texts:
Andermahr, Sonya, editor. Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism. MDPI, 2016.
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
Felman, Shoshanna and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Harris, Judith. Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self Through Writing. SUNY P, 2003.
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Possible additional readings:
Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Flights of Imagination.” Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 23-46.
—–. “Let Us be the Healing of the Wound.” Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 9-22.
Batzer, Benjamin. “Healing Classrooms,” Composition Forum 34 (Summer 2016)
Beltrán, Ramona, and Stephanie Begun. “‘It Is Medicine’: Narratives of Healing from the Aotearoa Digital Storytelling as Indigenous Media Project (ADSIMP).” Psychology and Developing Societies, vol. 26, no. 2, Sept. 2014, pp. 155–179.
Desser, Daphne. “Public Memory, Memoir, and the Shoah: Narrating Inherited Trauma.” Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies. Vol. 15, Autumn, 2020.153-172.
—–.“Teaching Writing in Hawai‘i after Pearl Harbor and 9/11: How to ‘Make Meaning’ and ‘Heal’ Despite National Propaganda.” Trauma and the Teaching of Writing. Ed. Shane Borrowman. Albany: SUNY P, 2005. 85-97
Dutro, Elizabeth. “Writing Wounded: Trauma, Testimony, and Critical Witness in Literacy Classrooms.” English Education. (January 2011)Justice, Daniel Heath.
Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle” American Imago, 48(1) (1991): 75-91.
Rothberg, Michael. “Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response.” Studies in the Novel 40 (2008): 224–34.
Ryden, Wendy. “From Purgation to Recognition: Catharsis and the Dialectic of Public and Private in Healing Writing.” JAC 30.1 (2010): 239-67. Web. 6 Oct. 2014.
Spear, Rachel N. “Let Me Tell You a Story”: On Teaching Trauma Narratives, Writing, and Healing” Pedagogy (2014) 14 (1): 53–79.
Tyler, Lisa (1999) “Narratives of Pain: Trauma and the Healing Power of Writing,” The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning: Vol. 5 , Article 4.
Likely Assignments:
Reading responses (rhetorical analysis/ pedagogical exercise/embodied critique)
1 Seminar Paper (including first draft and peer review)