Aporias of Trauma in Joyce's Ulysses and Faulkner's Light in August

In this thesis, I explore the relationships between trauma, memory, and narrative, particularly the ways in which trauma simultaneously disrupts and engenders narrative structures. I consider various trauma theories by authors such as Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, Ruth Leys, and Dominick LaCapra. I also consider how psychoanalytic theory and criticism, specifically the writings of Sigmund Freud, inform the study of traumatic experience from both literary and personal perspectives. Furthermore, I consider theories regarding the relationship between trauma and narrative by authors such as Peter Brooks and John Pilkington. James Joyce¿s Ulysses and William Faulkner¿s Light in August serve, for my purposes, as trauma-texts and reflect the ways in which trauma might complicate the simultaneous destruction and creation of narrative strategies. Reading Ulysses and Light in August as trauma-texts that are both in mourning and melancholic gives us complementary, and contradictory, reasons for why we enjoy them. Mourning constructs a relationship between victim and witness, in which we can hear the voice of trauma and engage it in discourse. Conversely, melancholia creates a relationship between performer and spectator, in which we experience, and are fascinated by, the spectacle of another¿s trauma. Laughter, perversity, sorrow, and respite engage the reader in both texts, and raise questions about how one `remembers-to-forget¿ traumatic experiences. The narratives of each text¿s characters offer unique performances of mourning and melancholia. Thus, while this thesis engenders more questions than answers, I hope to argue that Ulysses and Light in August are significant literary works because each engages the reader in traumatic discourse, entertains the reader with the traumatic spectacle, and enlightens the reader on the complex relationship between trauma and narrative.

Writing the Unspeakable: an Ethical Approach to a Traumatized Narrative

This project uses the works of contemporary author Tim O’Brien, whose fiction often performs the trauma of the Vietnam War, to explore new ways of encountering the traumatized text. Informed by Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face, and Sigmund Freud’s and Dominick LaCapra’s work on the narratology of the melancholic and the mourner, I consider the different ways we respond to the suffering Other and explore the paradox that through reading a traumatized narrative empathically we may come face-toface, as it were, with the suffering Other. If this is indeed the case, I reason, then the obligations that are due to the Other are also due to the text itself.

Harry Potter and the Theory of Things

This thesis investigates the boundaries between body and object in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, seven children’s literature novels published between 1997 and 2007. Lord Voldemort, Rowling’s villain, creates Horcruxes—objects that contain fragments of his soul—in order to ensure his immortality. As vessels for human soul, these objects rupture the boundaries between body and object and become “things.” Using contemporary thing theorists including John Plotz and materialists Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin, I look at Voldemort’s Horcruxes as transgressive, liminal, unclassifiable entities in the first chapter. If objects can occupy the juncture between body and object, then bodies can as well. Dementors and Inferi, dark creatures that Rowling introduces throughout the series, live devoid of soul. Voldemort, too, becomes a thing as he splits his soul and creates Horcruxes. These soulless bodies are uncanny entities, provoking fear, revulsion, nausea, and the loss of language. In the second chapter, I use Sigmund Freud’s theorization of the uncanny as well as literary critic Kelly Hurley to investigate how Dementors, Inferi, and Voldemort exist as body-turned-object things at the juncture between life and death. As Voldemort increasingly invests his immaterial soul into material objects, he physically and spiritually degenerates, transforming from the young, handsome Tom Marvolo Riddle into the snake-like villain that murdered Harry’s parents and countless others. During his quest to find and destroy Voldemort’s Horcruxes, Harry encounters a different type of object, the Deathly Hallows. Although similarly accessing boundaries between body/object, life/death, and materiality/immateriality, the three Deathly Hallows do not transgress these boundaries. Through the Deathly Hallows, Rowling provides an alternative to thingification: objects that enable boundaries to fluctuate, but not breakdown. In the third chapter, I return to thing theorists, Baudrillard, and Benjamin to study how the Deathly Hallows resist thingification by not transgressing the boundaries between body and object.