Trauma and Narrative in the Uninvited
ISSN 1923-1555[Print] Studies in Literature and Language ISSN 1923-1563[Online] Vol. 20, No. 3, 2020, pp. 79-83 www.cscanada.net DOI:10.3968/11705 www.cscanada.org Trauma and Narrative in The Uninvited LUO Xiaoxia[a],* [a]School of Foreign Languages, Shangqiu Normal University, Shangqiu, Trauma is defined as “an experience in which an Henan, China. individual is directly involved in or witnesses an event * Corresponding author. which evokes feelings of a loss of safety, helplessness, Received 7 April 2020; accepted 4 June 2020 intense fear, horror, and a threat of annihilation” (Herman Published online 26 June 2020 2001:1). In the treatment of trauma victims, one of the concerns is the function of narrative in the recovery Abstract of trauma victims. To heal trauma, the victims must Due to the incomprehensibility of trauma and its understand what really happened in the past, thus narrating consequent devastating results on trauma victims, there the trauma becomes essential for the trauma victims. But are debates on the possibility of narrating trauma. But for the trauma victims, trauma seems unrepresentable by fiction, what cannot be represented by conventional because a traumatic event such as the Holocaust is “an historical, cultural and autobiographical narrative can event that stretched the powers of the moral imagination be represented. This article approaches the film The beyond the potential for understanding, witnessing, Uninvited from the prospective of trauma and narrative and judging” (Ball, 2000, p.10). The same argument is studies. Taking the film, The Uninvited as a literary text, put forward by Cathy Caruth in her book Unclaimed this article examines how the film mirrors the mind Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, and Caruth of trauma victims and how the trauma narrative was explains “For the survivor of trauma, the truth of the event presented by literary devices such as internal focalization, may reside not only in its brutal facts, but also in the way intertextuality, ghost, flashbacks, etc.
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