Octavia Butler's Kindred

The discussion of Octavia Butler's Kindred generated varying responses. Many of you were disappointed in the book, and found it to be fundamentally flawed when it comes to representing atrocity. But many of you also enjoyed the book. I'd like to open this post up for you to further discuss your feelings about the novel. Use specific examples from the text when possible.

Sherman Alexie on Postliterature

I'll post something more on Sherman Alexie's Flight later, but for now, you may want to check out Professor David Cockley's post on the novel. Feel free to leave comments over there.

DeLillo and The American Mystery

In Chapter 13 of Don DeLillo's White Noise, we learn about the disappearance of the Treadwells, an older couple who live in the community. They are later found in a strip mall. What is significant about both their disappearance and discovery? On page 60, the narrator says that the "American mystery deepens"--what does this mean?

Metaphor and Metonymy

In Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl," Rosa Lublin develops an obsession with the shawl that once belonged to her daughter Magda. In class, we talked about the difference between representation/metaphor and extension/non-representation/metonymy. Does the shawl, the actual object, function in the narrative as metaphor or metonymy? Both? Neither? Use specific examples from the text to support your answer.

Giorgio Agamben and Anne Michaels

Last Monday in class we talked a bit about the idea that there are no "complete" witnesses to Auschwitz. We talked about Primo Levi's suggestion that only the "drowned" can fully bear witness to the atrocities of the camps. In "The Archive and Testimony," Agamben writes "so the remnants of Auschwitz--the witnesses--are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them" (164).

What is Agamben saying here? Is he contradicting Levi? What does he mean by "remnants"? How might we better understand Anne Michaels' novel Fugitive Pieces through what Agamben is saying here?

Fugitive Pieces: Child Survivors and Children of Survivors

Despite the inescapability of the failure of words—since in their utterance is both representation and replacement, which create insurmountable distance between the atrocity and us--literature remains a likely space to forge an appropriate response to the Holocaust and other collective tragedies. In class, we discussed looking at Fugitive Pieces as a literary text that demonstrates how to utilize representational modes in a way that reveals their shortcomings without sacrificing the eloquence and lyrical components that draw us to literature. In the first part of the novel, Jakob's narrative, we encounter a response to trauma that is gripping despite--or perhaps because of--the narrator's inability to access the specific details of the traumatic experience.

In the second part of the novel, Ben's narrative, we witness another narrator's inability to access the details of the traumatic experience. The difference, however, is that Ben is not a survivor of the Holocaust; he is a child of survivors, which means that he is essentially trying to access someone else's trauma and claim it as his own. Although the details of "the event" remain just out of reach for both Jakob and Ben, they each confront it in a vastly different way.

What are some of the differences you see in the two narratives? How do you account for them? What do you make of them? What might these differences tell us about the ethics of representation?

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog for Monica Osborne's English 182C class at UCLA: "The American Literary Response to Trauma." I'll be posting every week, and counting on you to respond insightfully and critically. Think of this space as an alternative venue for class discussion. Be respectful of others' viewpoints, but don't be afraid to challenge them and raise additional questions for discussion. Also, as you post, be sure that you are engaging with all of the comments, rather than just responding to my initial post. The goal here is energetic dialogue, so have fun with this!