Moving in with Trauma (NeMLA 2023)
We have always lived with trauma, but how do we embrace trauma into our lives and create a meaningful life in the world we live in?
In recent years, critical considerations of aesthetics or beauty have been de-emphasized in literary criticism. There is a certain taboo about the notion of beauty, as Elaine Scarry has neatly pointed out: “many people have either actively advocated a taboo on beauty or passively omitted it from their vocabulary, even when thinking and writing about beautiful objects such as painting and poems” (117). There has been many talks about how aesthetics demeans a work’s values—serving as Bourgeois distractions from the real social issues we face, which rightfully remains as an important critical consideration.