Trauma and the Shame of the Unspeakable: The Holocaust, American Slavery, and Childhood Sexual Abuse

The problem of representing traumatic experience has been raised by witnesses and survivors, psychoanalysts, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and artists. This course compares three historical situations--The Holocaust, American slavery, and childhood sexual abuse--by reading histories, memoirs, and fictions, and analyzing material cultural artifacts such as memorials. Questions about the relation of individual trauma to collective and cultural trauma will be pursued through readings that will include Freud, Jeffrey Alexander, Judith Herman, Dominique La Capra, Primo Levi, Jill Christman, Harriet Jacobs,Toni Morrison, Gayle Jones and Art Spiegelman.