This thesis aims at exploring the consequences of migration in Jhumpa Lahirir¡¦s novel The Namesake. Set in India and America, the story represents such immigrant experiences as the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and the tangled ties between generations. In addition to introduction and conclusion, the thesis consists of three chapters, devoted respectively to issues of nostalgia, identity, and cultural hybridity. Chapter One explores the way nostalgia affects the Ganguli family in their daily life, including such aspects as food, clothing, their circle of friends, festivals and celebrations. To analyze Indian immigrants¡¦ longing for home and their attempts to retain homeland culture, I employ Svetlana Boym¡¦s theory on nostalgia, wherein two kinds of nostalgia are distinguished: the restorative and the reflective. Chapter Two focuses on immigrants¡¦ identity formation. The process of identity formation is associated with naming and generational problems. I adopt the Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex to explain the father-son conflicts: how the protagonist defies his father as well as the name given by him. Then, drawing upon Cathy Caruth¡¦s concept of traumatic awakening, I trace how the protagonist reconciles with his father and reaches maturity. Chapter Three examines how immigrants come to invent a hybrid cultural identity. I employ Homi Bhabha¡¦s concepts of in-bewteenness and the Third Space to point out the interplay of the Bengali heritage and the dominant American culture, which results in the phenomenon of a new, dynamic, and mixed culture. With globalization, borders and boundaries are constantly changing so that migration comes to be typical of human condition. In this sense, the immigrant experience stated in The Namesake foregrounds problems which might be encountered by all diasporas.

In literary trauma theory, victimized victimizers represent an ambiguous area. In my thesis, I show how Perry Smith, a historical figure in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and Josef Kavalier, a fictional character in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, represent these ambiguities. Both men become murderers acting out violence that was inflicted upon them as children. However, only Kavalier seems to work through the trauma.

Al Qaeda killings, posttraumatic stress, and the Gothic together triangulate a sizable space in recent American fiction that is still largely uncharted by critics. This thesis maps that shared territory in four novels written between 2005 and 2007 by writers who were born in America, and whose protagonists are the survivors in New York City after the World Trade Center falls. Published in the city of their tragedy and reviewed in its media, the novels surveyed here include Don DeLillo’s _Falling Man_ (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer’s _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_ (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s _The Writing on the Wall_ (2005), and Jess Walter’s _The Zero_ (2006). The thesis issues a challenge to the large number of negative and dismissive reviews of the novels under consideration, making a case that under different criteria, shaped by trauma theory and psychoanalysis, the novels succeed after all in making readers feel what it was to be alive in September 2001, enduring the posttraumatic stress for months and years later. The thesis asserts that 9/11 fiction is too commonly presented in popular journals and scholarly studies as an undifferentiated mass. In the same critical piece a journalist or an academic may evaluate narratives in which unfold a terrorist's point of view, a surviving or a dying New York City victim's perspective, and an outsider's reaction set thousands of miles away from Ground Zero. What this thesis argues for is a separation in study of the fictive strands that meditate on the burning towers, treating the New York City survivor story as a discrete body. Despite their being set in one of the most known cities of the Western world, and the terrorist attack that they depict being the most- watched catastrophe ever experienced in real-time before, these fictions have not yet been critically ordered. Charting the salient reappearing conflicts, unsettling descriptions, protagonist decay, and potent techniques for registering horror that resurface in this New York City 9/11 fiction, this thesis proposes and demonstrates how the peculiar and affecting Gothic tensions in the works can be further understood by trauma theory, a term coined by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996: 72). Though the thesis concentrates on developments in trauma theory from the mid 1990s to 2015, it also addresses its theoretical antecedents: from the earliest voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked mental illness to a trauma (Charcot, Janet, Breuer, Freud), to researchers from mid-twentieth century (Adler, Lindemann) who studied how catastrophe affects civilian minds not previously trained to either fight war or withstand cataclysm. Always keeping at the fore the ancient Greek double-meaning of trauma as both unhealing “wound” and “defeat,” the thesis surveys tenets of the trauma theorists from the very first of those who studied the effects on civilian survivors of disaster (of what is still the largest nightclub fire in U.S. history, which replaced front page coverage of World War II for a few days: the Cocoanut Grove blaze in Boston, 1942) up to those theorists writing in 2015. The concepts evolving behind trauma theory, this thesis demonstrates, provide a useful mechanism to discuss the surprising yearnings hiding behind the appearance of doppelgängers, possession ghosts, terrorists as monsters, empty coffins, and visitants that appear to feed on characters’ sorrow, guilt, and loneliness within the novels under discussion. This thesis reappraises the dominant idea in trauma studies of the mid-1990s, namely that trauma victims often cannot fully remember and articulate their physical and psychic wounds. The argument here is that, true to the theories of the Caruthian school, the victims in these novels may not remember and express their trauma completely and in a linear fashion. However, the victims figured in these novels do relate the horrors of their memory to a degree by letting their narration erupt with the unexpectedly Gothic images, tropes, visions, language, and typical contradictions, aporias, lacunae, and paradoxes. The Gothic, one might say, becomes the language in which trauma speaks and articulates itself, albeit not always in the most cogent of signs. One might easily dismiss these fleeting Gothic presences that characters conjure in the fictions under consideration as anomalous apparitions signalling nothing. However, this thesis interrogates these ghostly traces of Gothicism to find what secrets they hold. Working from the insights of psychoanalysis and its post-Freudian re-inventers and challengers, it aims to puzzle out the dimensions of characters’ mourning in its “traumagothic” reading of the texts. Characters’ use of the Gothic becomes their way of remembering, a coded language to the curious. This thesis holds that unexpressed grief and guilt are the large constant in this grouping of novels. Characters’ grief articulation and guilt release, or the desire for symbolic amnesia, take paths that the figures often were suspicious of before 9/11: a return to organized religion, a belief in spirits, a call for vengeance, psychotherapy, substance abuse, splitting with a partner, rampant sex with nearby strangers, torture of suspects, and killing. All the earnest attempts through the above means by the characters to express grief, vent rage, and alleviate survivor guilt do so without noticeable success. True closure towards their trauma is largely a myth. No reliable evidence surfaces from the close reading of the texts that those affected by trauma ever fully recover. However, as this thesis demonstrates, other forms of recompense come from these searches for elusive peace and the nostalgic longing for the America that has been lost to them.

<p>This project presents a case study of postmodern trauma, working at the boundaries of the humanities and computer science to produce an in-depth examination of trauma writing in David Foster Wallace’s novel <i>Infinite Jest</i>. The goal of this project is to examine the intricacies of syntax and language in postmodern trauma writing through an iterative process I refer to as <i>broken reading</i>, which combines traditional humanities methodologies (close reading) and distant, computational methodologies (Natural Language Processing). Broken reading begins with close reading, then ventures into the distant reading processes of sentiment analysis and entity analysis, and then returns again to close reading when the data must be analyzed and the broken computational elements must be corrected. While examining the syntactical structure of traumatic and non-traumatic passages through this broken reading methodology, I found that Wallace represents trauma as gendered. The male characters in the novel, when recollecting past traumata or undergoing traumatic events, maintain their subject status, recognize those around them as subjects, and are able to engage actively with the world around them. On the other hand, the female characters in the novel are depicted as lacking the same capacities for subjectivity and action. Through computational text analysis, it becomes clear that Wallace writes female trauma in a way that reflects their lack of agency and subjectivity while he writes male trauma in a way that maintains their agency and subjectivity. Through close reading, I was able to discover qualitative differences in Wallace’s representations of trauma and form initial observations about syntactical and linguistic patterns; through distant reading, I was able to quantify the differences I uncovered through close reading by conducting part of speech tagging, entity analysis, semantic analysis, and sentiment analysis. Distant reading led me to discover elements of the text that I had not noticed previously, despite the occasional flaw in computation. The analyses I produced through this broken reading process grew richer because of failure—when I failed as an interpreter, and when computational analysis failed, these failures gave me further insight into the trauma writing within the novel. Ultimately, there are marked syntactical and linguistic differences between the way that Wallace represents male and female trauma, which points toward the larger question of whether other white male postmodern authors gender trauma in their writings, too. This study has generated a prototype model for the <i>broken reading </i>methodology, which can be used to further examine postmodern trauma writing.</p>

This thesis seeks to understand how we read and understand the use of depictions of violence by examining its rhetorical presentation. Although the media gives us a mixed understanding of the way that experiencing violence secondarily (that is, through all types of media) affects us, scholarship in this area has proved clear connections between viewing/experiencing depictions of violence and raised levels of aggression. On the other hand, there is a clear difference between gratuitous depictions of violence and socially useful depictions of violence (i.e., the difference between a slasher movie and a holocaust movie) that that area of scholarship does not expressly take into account. I argue that the language of trauma studies has the ability to evaluate the impact of violent texts on audiences and that Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic Pentad has the ability the examine depictions of violence to uncover explicit and hidden ideologies that affect the presentation of the violence and, thus, our reception and interpretation of that violence. Working in conjunction, these two theories can help audience's understand depictions of violence on an ideological level and help them to assess the violence's potential traumatic impact on themselves and others within certain contexts. To demonstrate this theory of understanding violence, I make two short analyses of Native Son and The Lovely Bones and demonstrate an in-depth analysis of Fight Club and Blood Meridian in order to give an example of the type of reading I am advocating and its potential for understanding and interpreting depictions of violence in ways that uncover both social benefit and harm. In the end, I hope that this theory of reading violence might extend beyond the sample readings I have done and into other types of media, so that we can all understand the ways that violence is used rhetorically for social and political purposes and be able to both use it and interpret it responsibly.

Aiming to make an intervention in both emerging Slow Cinema and classical Trauma Cinema scholarship, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the post-trauma cinema of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz merges aesthetics of cinematic slowness with narratives of post-trauma in his films Melancholia (2008), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) and Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012). Diaz has been repeatedly considered as representative of what Jonathan Romney termed in 2004 “Slow Cinema”. The director uses cinematic slowness for an alternative approach to an on-screen representation of post-trauma. Contrary to popular trauma cinema, Diaz’s portrait of individual and collective trauma focuses not on the instantenaeity but on the duration of trauma. In considering trauma as a condition and not as an event, Diaz challenges the standard aesthetical techniques used in contemporary Trauma Cinema, as highlighted by Janet Walker (2001, 2005), Susannah Radstone (2001), Roger Luckhurst (2008) and others. Diaz’s films focus instead on trauma’s latency period, the depletion of a survivor’s resources, and a character’s slow psychological breakdown. Slow Cinema scholarship has so far focused largely on the films’ aesthetics and their alleged opposition to mainstream cinema. Little work has been done in connecting the films’ form to their content. Furthermore, Trauma Cinema scholarship, as trauma films themselves, has been based on the immediate and most radical signs of post-trauma, which are characterised by instantaneity; flashbacks, sudden fears of death and sensorial overstimulation. Following Lutz Koepnick’s argument that slowness offers “intriguing perspectives” (Koepnick, 2014: 191) on how trauma can be represented in art, this thesis seeks to consider the equally important aspects of trauma duration, trauma’s latency period and the slow development of characteristic symptoms. With the present work, I expand on current notions of Trauma Cinema, which places emphasis on speed and the unpredictability of intrusive memories. Furthermore, I aim to broaden the area of Slow Cinema studies, which has so far been largely focused on the films’ respective aesthetics, by bridging form and content of the films under investigation. Rather than seeing Diaz’s slow films in isolation as a phenomenon of Slow Cinema, I seek to connect them to the existing scholarship of Trauma Cinema studies, thereby opening up a reading of his films.