Visual Rhetorics of Witnessing: Representation, War, and Cultural Trauma (Leaders: A. Susan Owen and Peter Ehrenhaus)

This seminar will examine works that contribute to our understanding of visual rhetorics of witnessing, where witnessing is defined as the rhetorical processes and practices through which traumatic memory is constructed. Visual rhetorics of witnessing operate at the intersection of traumatizing cultural experience, collective identity, and narrative (discursive and visual) representation practices. The manner in which traumatic memory is narrativized provides glimpses into the process of collective (i.e., national) identity construction and the dynamics of ideological struggles to construct usable pasts. Readings will include theoretical treatments of “trauma,” “narrative,” “history,” and their relationships, as well as critical studies that address specific sites of cultural trauma and hegemonic struggle.
Bibliography

Bibliography

Caruth, C. (1991). Unclaimed experience: Trauma and the possibility of history. Yale French Studies, 79, 181-192.

Crane, S.A. (1997). Writing the individual back into collective memory. American Historical Review, 105 (5), 1372-1385.

Hartman, G. (1994). Public memory and its discontents. Raritan, 13 (4), 24-40.

Huggins, Nathan I. “The Deforming Mirror of Truth: Slavery and the Master Narrative of American History.” Radical History Review 49 (1991): 25-48.

Jelin, E. (1998, Sept/Oct.). The minefields of memory. NACLA Report on the Americas, 32 (2), 23-30.

Leys, R. (1994). Traumatic cures: Shell shock, Janet, and the question of memory. Critical Inquiry, 20, 623-662.

Savage, K. (1994). The politics of memory: Black emancipation and the Civil War monument. In J.R. Gillis (Ed.), Commemorations: The politics of national identity (pp. 127-149). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997

Schudson, M. (1989). The present in the past versus the past in the present. Communication, 11, 105-113.

Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

White, H. (1980). The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. In W.J.T. Mitchell (Ed.), On narrative (pp. 1-24). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Participants