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DESCRIPTION: The course focuses on exploring how the American culture constructs subjectivity and identity in relation to various traumas. As such, the course investigates collective and personal traumas and how the interactions with the traumas create a unique opportunity for creating texts that address the traumas from a variety of perspectives.
The spectatorship of destruction is part of making meaning of the modern world. In journals, magazines, television, YouTube, or on the Internet, traumatic events are rhetorically packaged and sold to the hungry audience, an audience who repeatedly "looks back" in order to construct themselves. The course focuses on exploring how trauma affects identity in personal narratives and social structures. Students explore trauma in relation to rhetoric, examine various cultural traumas and their effects on the construction of self, and position themselves as subjects in the creation of rhetoric on trauma.
The course involves an examination of how trauma is packaged by visiting various local museums, watching a variety of films, reading a variety of texts (primary and secondary), maintaining a daily writing blog and digital narrative of your experiences, participating in interviews with survivors and witnesses, and ultimately crafting a digital and textual narrative showcasing the students' overall knowledge.
In addition, the course functions as a writing course, so the work will focus on creating and understanding how the writer uses texts to construct and to critique identity. Additionally, the course will require the student to analyze various modes of writing and discourse in relation to the course material and readings.