Abstracts for papers are requsted for the panel "Time and Trauma in Twentieth-century Literature" at

The 48th NeMLA Annual Convention, March 23-26, 2017, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Please follow this link to read the CFP on NeMLA webpage: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16515

For abstract submission guidelines, please visit: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/submit.html

You must submit your abstract through NeMLA online submission system by creating your user account at: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login

For detailed information about NeMLA 2017 convention, important deadlines, presenter policies and registration fee, please visit: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html

For any panel related question, please send an email: Victoria Papa at v.papa@northeastern.edu  

PANEL TITLE: 

Time and Trauma in Twentieth-century Literature

DESCRIPTION:

If the work of trauma studies has a single command, it is to more closely listen to what absences tell us. Aligned with the generative impulse of Fred Moten’s apt phrase, “in the break”—which he contends is the transformative space, or lack thereof, out of which radical black aesthetics emerges—the literature of trauma is often punctuated by breaks, specifically, breaks in a normative conception of linear, chronological time that engender an alternative temporal ontology. In trauma narratives, what it means to survive often emerges in the break or through what remains unspeakable about a past traumatic experience. In turn, such narratives put readers to task, calling upon them to be present in the task of listening to the absences of a fractured history. If as trauma theorist Cathy Caruth contends in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, trauma is “[a] wound of the mind—[a] breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world,” then how does literature signify, perform, and, perhaps, recuperate such a breach? What kinds of aesthetic strategies and formal devices capture the temporal experience of trauma and its complex relation to the past? What is time’s relation to readerly experience as a platform for witnessing trauma? How might stories of trauma contain a sense of futurity by presuming a readerly audience? 

This call solicits papers that explore the temporal dynamics of traumatic experience in twentieth-century literature. In particular, this session seeks papers that address questions of trauma and time from the intersections of trauma studies and various other theoretical disciplines such as queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies. How might a cross-theoretical discourse about trauma engender a more nuanced understanding of trauma’s relation to time?