Aesthetics of Survival: Counternarratives of Trauma in American Modernist Literature

FAIN: FT-291450-23

Victoria Papa
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (North Adams, MA 01247-4124)

Research and writing of a monograph examining how early twentieth century American authors expand representations of trauma.

Almost one-hundred years ago, modernists writing from the margins of a literary movement—or those who wrote about race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability—provided a counternarrative to the dominant psychoanalytic theory of trauma. “Aesthetics of Survival: Counternarratives of Trauma in American Modernist Literature” traces this alternative history to argue that American authors of the 1920s to 1940s—including Richard Bruce Nugent, Langston Hughes, H.D, Lola Ridge, Djuna Barnes, and Zora Neale Hurston—wrote out of the experience of social injustice to expand representations of trauma. Rather than locate trauma in major catastrophe, sudden accidents, and the imminent threat of physical death, as Sigmund Freud did in his work, these writers depict the impact of durational, intersectional, and collective violences to ultimately emphasize resiliency in the face of oppression.

Associated Products

"No Thing We Know:" Race, Jazz, and Psychoanalysis (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "No Thing We Know:" Race, Jazz, and Psychoanalysis
Author: Victoria Papa
Abstract: Victoria Papa considers how psychoanalysis and race intersect within the improvisational aesthetics of Langston Hughes's blues and jazz poetry by turning to Hortense Spillers’ essay “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race.” Jazz, here, is a counter-technology to psychoanalysis; it at once bears witness to structural traumas of racism while feeling into what Spillers calls a “free-floating realm of self-didactic possibility.”
Date: 10/26/2023
Primary URL: https://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa2023/
Primary URL Description: Modernist Studies Association 2023 Conference Program
Conference Name: Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference

Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University
Author: Victoria Papa
Abstract: As a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University, I participated in a weekly seminar related to theme "Possession." I workshopped materials based on my NEH-funded project in the seminar on March 21, 2024. The description of the work shared at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University is as follows: My book project, Aesthetics of Survival: Modernist Literature and Minoritarian Worldmaking, traces an alternative history of modernism and crisis to show how Black, queer, and feminist authors wrote out of the experience of systemic oppression to expand representations of trauma beyond fractured narratives of war and sudden accident. By decentering the major trauma of the World Wars in their literature, these authors, including Langston Hughes, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Lola Ridge, reveal that the aesthetic challenge of representing experience—so fundamental to modern literary consciousness—is as strongly linked to the incremental violence as it is to mass catastrophe. Emphasizing resiliency in the face of oppression, I argue that these writers depict a nuanced order of trauma aligned with pluralistic forms of minoritarian worldmaking. I consider the multivalence of trauma as a form of possession that is not only “a modality of disempowerment but potentially of empowerment and refusal too.” Through transgressive aesthetics that push modernist sensibilities of experimentation to their brink, I argue that the authors of my study bring into form the edge states of precarity, taking possession of their survival through narratives that testify to non-normative modes of being.
Date Range: January 25 - April 25 2024
Location: Rutgers University - New Brunswick, NJ
Primary URL: https://irw.rutgers.edu/people/visiting-scholars
Primary URL Description: "Visiting Scholar" profile on the Institute for Research on Women's website.

“True To My Own Orbit:” H.D. and Leonora Carrington’s Minoritarian Mytho-Aesthetics (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “True To My Own Orbit:” H.D. and Leonora Carrington’s Minoritarian Mytho-Aesthetics
Author: Victoria Papa
Abstract: This talk examines how the modernist writer H.D. and the surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington navigate questions of illness, care, and healing through a minoritarian mytho-aesthetics. Resisting patriarchal and ableist authority in favor of self-knowledge and spiritual-seeking, H.D. and Carrington engage in feminist forms of autotheory and magical thinking that dismantle conventional therapeutic models of trauma work. This presentation is based on a chapter of a book-in-progress, Survival Aesthetics: Creative Expression and the Critique of Trauma.
Date: 3/1/2024
Conference Name: Works-in-Progress Seminar held by Research and Academic Programs at The Clark Art Institute

Bad Form: Queer Aesthetics of Refusal (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Bad Form: Queer Aesthetics of Refusal
Abstract: This work-in-progress talk examines how writers and visual artists of the 20th- and 21st-centuries create queer aesthetics of refusal to depict and resist everyday traumas of cisheteropatriarchy. To configure a quotidian order of survival, these artists engage so-called ugly feelings and bad tastes as aesthetic forms of rebellion. They commit to queer futures by enacting modes of temporal evacuation, troubling the here and now as a benevolent site of promise. Their work offers a queer archive of embodied experience that reimagines scenes of sexual oppression and gender essentialism as ripe with dissent.
Author: Victoria Papa
Date: 4/22/2024
Location: Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, MA

Beyond Care (Article)
Title: Beyond Care
Author: Victoria Papa
Author: Levi Prombaum
Author: Laura Dickstein Thompson
Abstract: This article appears in The Brooklyn Rail's Critics' Page series, "Looking After: On Art and Healing." It reflects on my experience co-directing the public humanities project, CARE SYLLABUS. My work as a co-director of CARE SYLLABUS has been directly influenced by my research on counternarratives of trauma that is central to my NEH-funded project.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://brooklynrail.org/2024/03/criticspage/Beyond-Care
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Publisher: The Brooklyn Rail

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