[ACCUTE 2025] Beyond Trauma (Studies)?
This panel aims to provoke discussion of “trauma” and the critical paradigm that has grown up around it in our time. Especially since the publication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience in 1996, “the traumatic” has grown from a specialist analytic discourse to a catch-all framework that informs how we talk about everything from politics, to art, to personal relationships. In short, the concept of trauma today enjoys a culturally dominant status. In recent years, however, the narrative trope of trauma has served as a target for critics increasingly frustrated with its seeming omnipresence.