Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Olster, Stacey | Kaplan, Elizabeth Ann | Santa Ana, Jeffrey | Harries, Martin.
Date
2016-12-01
Keywords
Contemporary American Literature, Critical Theory, Dark Comedy, Genre, Psychoanalysis, Trauma | English literature -- American literature -- Literature
Department
Department of English
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77518
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
This project explores how dark comedy negotiates between varying and paradoxically conflicting reactions to traumatic experience. These reactions unfold in two ways: the specific moments of “punctual trauma†and the “structural traumas,†wherein illusory structures of the ego – including sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and the sense of immortality – are dissembled and deconstructed. Thus, the traumas represented – in novels by Joseph Heller, Gustav Hasford, Gore Vidal, Chuck Palahniuk, Gary Shteyngart, Thomas King, and Robert Coover; films by Mike Nichols, Stanley Kubrick, and David Fincher – concern characters facing a seemingly oppositional choice between “witnessing,†providing “testimony†about the traumatic crimes inflicted on them, and “disavowing,†repressing the loss of psychological cohesion that has resulted from their trauma. This tension – between witnessing and disavowal – is complicated by the representational question central to both literature and critical theories of trauma: in giving testimony, must a witness present the literal or “veridical†truth of an event, or may he or she instead present the metaphorical or “affective†truth of an event? These texts offer no complete resolutions, but each makes use of Freudian comedy to negotiate between witnessing and disavowing trauma, and between literal and metaphorical representation. Moving from the visceral traumas of war to the more conceptual traumas of identity, each text turns in unique ways to Freud’s tendentious jokes (from Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious) and specifically his skeptical jokes. Shielding both the author and the audience in a protective envelope of comedy, these are “jokes with a purpose.†They question our epistemological certainties, or “speculative possessions,†chief amongst which are the pillars of our identity. The genre of dark comedy is built on these jokes, which present not the overlap or oscillation but a true ambivalence of the tragic (or traumatic) and the comedic (or disavowing). In this ambivalence, dark comedy partially resolves the tensions revolving around traumatic experience, but does not solve the problems of trauma; these texts all gesture to “analysis interminable,†unresolvable neurosis. However, these texts also represent the dangers of eliminating neurosis, including the loss of a self that is sacred in spite of being illusory. | 322 pages
Recommended Citation
Schachtman, Benjamin Nathan, "Traumedy: Dark Comedic Negotiations of Trauma in Contemporary American Literature" (2016). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3325.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3325