MLA 2001 (12 27 - 30 2001) New Orleans, LA.
*** This panel has yet to be sanctioned by the MLA ctte***
*** If sanctioned, ALL panelists MUST be MLA members by 04 01 2001 ***
Considering their insistence on the primacy of healing and
elucidation in the practice of literary hermeneutics, it is logical that
methodologies stressing the vital importance of shame and trauma in the
representation of autonomy often function concurrently. With a view to
developing a new understanding of the subject as being traumatically
constituted, post-Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists such as
Caruth (1995, 1996), Felman (1985, 1995), Herman (1992), Silverman (1996)
and Teichholz and Kriegman (1998), have proceeded from heterogeneous
interpretations of Sigmund Freud^Rs (1967) work dealing with war trauma
and masochism. Concurrently, additional literary theorists/ clinicians,
such as Morrison (1989), Jacoby (1991), Nathanson (1992), Wurmser (1981,
1997, 2000), Berman (1977, 1985, 1990, 1995), Sedgewick and Frank (1995),
Adamson and Clarke (1999), and Schapiro (1983, 1999) were busy at work
disseminating shame theory via the work of Kohut (1977) and Tomkins
(1962), where attention to affective cycles of shame constitute the
methodology^Rs basis.
Put simply, trauma theory focuses on the proto-experience of an
individual and her need to have it conceptualized through language, while
shame theory provides a framework explaining often pathological forms of
behavior as symptoms of intense shame. Curiously, despite the proximity
and intention of their projects, both convocations have yet to be
theoretically addressed by the other. This effacement would seem to be a
product of hermeneutical idiosyncracies constituting each reading
practice, rather than the result of any actual ideological dissimilarity.
For example, although both groups exercise close readings of texts, the
former group considers the text as if it were written to symbolize or
represent the experience of trauma, endeavoring to elucidate the
ineluctable and instrumenting this void into speech. By bringing this
violent silence into efflorescence these critics facilitate, as it were,
an emancipation of that presupposed to be repressed in the text.
Conversely, shame theory engrosses traumatic narratives through its
attention to severely paralyzing shame affects manifested in individual
narratives. Nevertheless, by paying close attention to symbology and
mythoi that often underscore fragmented narratives and give them meaning,
all of these theorists ethically elucidate, in one form or another,
literary representations of trauma, masochism and shame.
Moreover, with the exception of Leon Wurmser^Rs recent clinical
investigation of ^Ssplitting,^T where trauma and shame affects are reduced
to a tandem mechanism labeled ^Smasochism,^T this unification of the two
affects has failed to be theorized (2000). Wurmser proposes both trauma
and shame originate in an affectively constructed masochism resulting from
traumata, where one^Rs shame affect cycle constitutes the behavioral,
material ^Sevidence^T for the non-elucidated trauma. When dealing with
contemporary writing where both theme and structure are often
significative of deep emotional disturbances, one would be hard pressed in
finding a more elucidating set of methodologies. Indeed, as Schapiro has
pointed out, ^Spsychoanalytic theory has only recently caught up with many
of the insights about psychological life^T constitutive of the novel
(1999). Thus, following Wurmser (2000) and Berman (1995), this panel will
theorize in an unprecedented fashion possible intersections between art,
philosophy and psychiatry, ultimately questing for conceivable therapeutic
methods that work well when applied to the novel.
Send abstracts of NO MORE than 300 - 500 words by
March 01 2001
to
William Alejandro Martin CNH 320
Dept. of English, McMaster University,
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. - L8S 4L9.
or (preferably) send WP and doc. to
martinwa@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca
or
grammar23@hotmail.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Alejandro Martin,
Doctoral Candidate, Department of English,
Humanities Representative,
McMaster University Graduate Student Association
Organization Secretary,
Lexis Paper Exchange
Editor, _Grad Street_.
Department of English (CNH 320)
McMaster University, 1280 Main Street W.
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. L8S 4L9.
Ph. - H - (905) 525 - 6739.
Ph. - C - (905) 978 - 5497.
Email: martinwa@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca
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