trauma

my, but it has been a while. i'm sorry i haven't come and there are a number of excuses why i haven't, but the most applicable one is that i haven't had any worthwhile thoughts to type up. i do now.

to put this into context, it is week 6 of spring quarter '07. i am taking another writing class, a french language class, a french literature class, and the last of a series of english classes based on literary movements: this one is on postmodernism.

it is interesting to note that a lot of us are constructs, products, of postmodernism. each of us are the sum of all the parts we come from and everyone on the internet today is, i'd venture to say, postmodernist simply by the fact that we were born after or during the war years. even though i was born during this literary movement, i always resisted it. i never liked reading postmodernist works because they seemed so obscene and violent for me. i'm learning that this is because postmodernism contains sorts of narratives that are deliberately meant to be jarring: the carnivalesque, metafiction, trauma narratives. and i had just begun to wonder why this was so when my professor proposed a theory.

postmodernism is considered a reactionary movement to modernism, rejecting the elitism and inaccessibility of modern works by Joyce and Pound and Eliot. but it is also a reaction to all the atrocities happening in the world. he talked about post traumatic stress disorder and how postmodernism is PTSD in literature. this very literary movement is a manifestation of literary and artistic PTSD. this would make sense due to all the happenings of the 20th and 21st century: world war I and II, atomic bombings, numerous horrible genocides all over the world, the Holocaust, the Cold War--anything and everything you can imagine that is so shameful and disgusting about the recent history of man on earth. it takes its toll on culture and art. literature, music, painting, photography--all these things are a response to trauma. but not trauma experienced by the individual artist, indeed many writers and painters and musicians create works based on their own concept of the trauma of the Holocaust or Rwanda without having experienced the actual trauma themselves. but they pervade so much of our society that we appropriate a sort of universal consciousness of trauma. not a lot of us can feel like we understand the mass killings happening all over the world, but we are always conscious of them, always aware. this consciousness of trauma around us is enough.

in literary history i don't think i've ever come across such brutal and new forms of text as in this postmodernist period. the changes that occur between middle english literature and chivalric literature, chivalric literature to the neoclassical to the romantic to the victorian--all the changes happen gradually. then we have modernism and postmodernism where things were done with language and the narrative that were incredibly new and unique, maybe too new and unique. it seemed to escalate too fast. there seemed to be too great of a disparaty.

i can't keep on this vein, though, because i have an assignment to finish, but its something to think about: how we live in a world with that overarching consciousness of trauma. i hope i live long enough to see this change.