Trauma Text

1. Traumatic Histories & Traumatic Narratives:Transformation in the Literary TransactionPyscher & Crampton, LRA 2013University of Minnesota

2. Pyscher & Crampton, LRA 2013 University of Minnesota What is the literary transactional relationship between youth with childhood traumatic histories and a ‘trauma text’? Both as reader and through one’s subsequent pedagogical experience, how might the literary transactions be transformative? To what extent does the text mediate sites of discourse and liminality towards transformative possibilities? Trauma Text Reader & their relationships with the SC world Site of discourse: Reader & Teacher/ SC spaces Mediated Transaction “Critical Poem” Site of discourse: Reader & Text Relational & pedagogical transformative possibilities Critical engagements/ transformation Reader

3. Youth with childhood histories of domestic violence are not ‘disordered’ “I continue to be surprised at the readings children give situations, and the difficulty that we have as teachers in finding a space to hear what children are saying” (p. 128) while…“too much activity, passion, anger, refusal, or resistance is pathologised.” -Cath Laws, Poststructualism at work with marginalised children, 2011

4. Resistive ambivalence/lived carnival Bakhtin (1981) contends, “the right to be ‘other’ in this world, the right not to make common cause with any single one of the existing categories that life makes available; none of these categories quite suits them [people of carnival], they see the underside and the falseness of every situation” (p. 159).

5. Resistive ambivalence/lived carnival/borderlands “Those who are pushed out of the tribe for being different are likely to become more sensitized (when not brutalized into insensitivity). Those who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in the world are more apt to develop this sense. Those who are pounced on the most have it the strongest - the females, the homosexuals of all races, the dark-skinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign.” --Anzaldua, Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987

6. The political silencing of traumatic childhood narratives in public schools “Where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, violence.” -- Rich, 1993

7. Literary transaction with trauma text as mediator “Frequently literature is the means by which youth discovers that his inner life reflects a common experience of others in his society. He finds that the impulses and reactions he feared are normal, that they are shared by many others in our society, and that they may merely be a convention (or a conspiracy) of silence about them. In this way, a particular poem…may provide liberation from blind fears of guilt.” --Rosenblatt, 1995

8. Critical engagement: creating the possibility of a transformative ‘poem’ “The representation and reception of trauma are extremely dynamic processes. We need to be aware of the shifting contexts affecting the production, circulation, and reception of trauma texts. And we must be accommodating of the varied subject positions that readers will bring to reading these texts.” --Douglas, p. 153 “Creating another text or medium based on the original literature is categorized as an efferent activity, for instance, but is it not also possible to live through the literature aesthetically in order to create from it something new?” --Lewis, 2000

9. Pyscher & Crampton, LRA 2013 University of Minnesota “If displacement, following its own literalness, is conceived of as a process of shifting or slipping between different places or domains of discourse, then it must be constituted in and by the gaps and oppositions of these domains. It will always be subject to the ruptures, dislocations, blockages, and gradients which exist in the hierarchy of speaking-subject-positions which make up the social formation.” --Stallybrass & White, 1986, p. 197 Trauma Text Reader & their relationships with the SC world Site of discourse: Reader & Teacher/ SC spaces Mediated Transaction “Critical Poem” Site of discourse: Reader & Text Relational & pedagogical transformative possibilities Critical engagement/transformation Reader

10. Literary transaction as ‘creative preparation’ “We [the marginalized] must develop a double vision arrived at through "world"-traveler else we will be zombified by the oppressor' is imaginative construction of us… “…as we exercise double vision, it is clear that this gives us a way of rejecting the reality of the oppressor as true, even when we recognize that it rules our lives, even from the inside. To reject it is not to diminish one's sense of its power, but it is a call not to be consumed by it. It is also a call that many of us hear as a revolutionary call, a call to dismantle oppressive reality. But the inhabitation of the limen is not a revolutionary move, it is rather a preparation, a creative preparation. The creation of liminal spaces involves this going back and forth from domination, negotiating that movement so as to maximize our freedom in an unfree situation. All of this, so far, is not about coalition but about reconstituting oneself as active. But it is here that we should see the need for coalition: a loving connection toward liberation.” --Lugones, 1987, “On Complex Communication”

11. Transformative possibilities… • “…traumatic remembering has been repositioned from the individual psyche to the social sphere, where it rightfully belongs” (Martin Alcoff & Gray-Rosendale, 1996). • “Centering the abuse functions to situate it as central to the childhood experience and challenges the previous marginality” (Douglas, 2011, p. 111). • “Literature, like therapy, has become a powerful mediator of child abuse” (Douglas, 2011,p. 130).

12. Pyscher & Crampton, LRA 2013 University of Minnesota RA Readers and their relationships with the SC world “…the body becomes a site for consciousness raising—a space upon which abuse claims can be made and the authenticity of his life narrative can be asserted.” --Douglas, p. 116 Schaafsma (1996) suggests, “Stories can be a means of rupturing and expanding the boundaries of discourse communities. Stories can explore the complexities, contradictions, and conflicts that many school environments have traditionally discouraged” (p. 111). Trauma Text Reader & their relationships with the SC world Site of discourse: Reader & Teacher/ SC spaces Mediated Transactions “Critical Poem” Site of discourse: Reader & Text Relational & pedagogical transformative possibilities Critical engagements/ transformation Reader

13. “Autobiographical representations of trauma make an invaluable contribution to the study of literature and culture. They offer indispensable eyewitness accounts of large-scale and everyday violence and, through their elaboration of specific scenes of terror and trauma, provide an antidote to universalizing about evil, suffering, and history” (Gilmore, 1994). “You better not never tell nobody but God.” --The Color Purple