Departing toward Survival: Reconsidering the Language of Trauma in Cathy Caruth, Ingeborg Bachmann and W. G. Sebald
Read full paper at: http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=51078#.VFMdomfHRK0 Author(s) Kathleen Ong XinWei * Affiliation(s) Columbia University Narrative Medicine Program, Columbia University in the City of New York, New York, USA . ABSTRACT Little has been said in trauma studies about the ability or inability of traumatized characters de-picted by traumatized writers to recover accounts of self from the aseptic reiterations of a language unable to articulate the unspeakable event of trauma. This paper argues that Cathy Caruth’s recent emphasis upon a “language of ashes”—derived from a “language of the life drive” departing from a “language of the death drive”—provides a framework for e...