portentous flashbacks
we get it lol you hate flashbacks
8 Matching Annotations
- Jan 2022
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outline.com outline.com
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As audiences grow inured, one trauma may not suffice. We must rival Job, rival Jude. In “WandaVision,” our protagonist weathers the murder of her parents, the murder of her twin, and the death, by her own hands, of her beloved, who is then resurrected and killed again. All that, and a subplot with a ticking time bomb.
At this point, I realize the author and I have entirely different ideas in mind regarding the label "trauma plot." The author seems to be describing the cheapest, laziest versions of plots involving trauma, and using the too-wide cap of "The Trauma Plot" to name them. Maybe my reverence of specificity and nuance wrt "trauma" is completely besides the authors point, maybe to them, these plots shouldnt be considered "trauma plots" at all. I disagree, but I'm fine w continuing under that assumption to read the rest of this article.
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It was not war or sexual violence that brought the idea of traumatic memory to light but the English railways, some six decades before Woolf chugged along from Richmond to Waterloo. In the eighteen-sixties, the physician John Eric Erichsen identified a group of symptoms in some victims of railway accident
The first records of trauma were recorded by 19th century westerners? aight ill take your word for it, for the sake of continuing
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Evoke the wound and we will believe that a body, a person, has borne it.
Maybe, but I'm suspicious of this because it sounds similar to that argument about CRT, that it reduces children to the sum of their races. Maybe im chicken and egging incorrectly here though. But it gives "we're more than our trauma, our characters should be, too!" Doesn't that just feel like an obnoxious demand? Especially to those writers who iterate heavily on trauma, who really interrogate it. What more do you want? Do I really want to bother to give that to you, whatever it is?
I also feel that it's actually not often these days that I read a character with trauma and I find that that's all there is. I haven't read "A Little Life." I actually haven't read most of the texts referenced in this article. Maybe we're just reading different things,
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The claim that trauma’s imprint is a timeless feature of our species, that it etches itself on the human brain in a distinct way, ignores how trauma has been evolving since the days of railway spine; traumatic flashbacks were reported only after the invention of film.
what? u lost me. u leaped. u set a record in the triple jump
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Its status has been little affected by the robust debates within trauma theory or, for that matter, by critics who argue that the evidence of van der Kolk’s theory of traumatic memory remains weak, and his claims uncorroborated by empirical studies (even his own)
21st century it girl bomb drop. all it girls who liked this book go to jail now.
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The question itself might offend: perhaps it’s grotesque to argue about the symbolic value attributed to suffering when so little restitution or remedy is available. So many laborious debates, all set aside when it’s time to be entertained.
I think these debates are constantly happening. Is this essay only addressing fans of genre fiction?
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The expanded definition has allowed many more people to receive care but has also stretched the concept so far that some 636,120 possible symptom combinations can be attributed to P.T.S.D., meaning that 636,120 people could conceivably have a unique set of symptoms and the same diagnosis. The ambiguity is moral as well as medical: a soldier who commits war crimes can share the diagnosis with his victims, Ruth Leys notes in “Trauma: A Genealogy” (2000). Today, with the term having grown even more elastic, this same diagnosis can apply to a journalist who reported on that atrocity, to descendants of the victims, and even to a historian studying the event a century later, who may be a casualty of “vicarious trauma.”
So far, this detail seems like a case FOR the trauma plot? At the end of the day, I might not agree with some claims of trauma or depictions of it, but I have no interest in telling authors what they're allowed to view or write as trauma. In fact, if we're able to write about trauma while reaching a level of specificity that can address deftly address different dimensions of it, that to me is a success. Frankly, I don't think that job is ever done.
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