ARTH 625

Representations of Trauma in the Visual Arts

This seminar examines the changing relationships between trauma and its representation in the twentieth century. Beginning with the Holocaust, the course charts a trajectory from this most profound of collective traumas, to the refinement of clinical definitions of trauma (e.g., PTSD) in the wake of the Vietnam War, to the development of trauma studies in the humanities in the 1990s, to the recent "pictorial turn" within scholarship on trauma. This historical framework will be brought to bear upon the dynamics of how trauma and visuality have been approached by scientists, scholars, and artists

Units: 3.0