Presenter(s): Julia Mueller
Faculty Mentor(s): Angela Bogart-Montieth
Oral Session 2 DL
Literary depictions of traumatic experiences are as complex as the human minds that experience and remember them. In literature, traumatic experiences are typically filtered through a character’s perspective: presented to the reader as a memory, clouded by that character’s naivete or lack thereof, shrouded by denial or emotion, and grappled with through language unique to that character. This research project explores the different techniques authors use to convey to the reader the confusion, struggle, and emotion of their characters’ traumatic experiences. In an effort to depict the realism of how that trauma affects or is comprehended by the character, authors often use types of ambiguous language. This is especially true with stories that depict sexual violence. I’ve examined five short stories wherein the authors use ambiguity to depict or refer to the character’s rape and found three main categories of ambiguity used: inexactness, omission, and allusion. In all five cases, the authors use different types of ambiguity to convey through language that their characters are struggling internally to come to terms with the traumatic experiences they’ve endured. This project aims to help authors and readers both understand techniques used to convey traumatic experiences and explore the human mind of a literary character as he or she processes trauma.