Katharina Donn

A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11: Representing Vulnerability in a Digitized Present is under contract with Routledge Research, and was funded via a competitively awarded research grant by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German Academy for Academic Excellence) and the Eccles Centre at the British Library. My project focuses on both theoretical and fictional work that might help us to understand how material and ideological boundaries and divisions have been challenged, blurred or subverted by the events of the past decade – and, in particular, by the terrorist attacks on the mainland of the United States.

I explore, in particular, ideas of mediation as they relate to the initial moments of terrorist encounter and to subsequent attempts to record and interpret those moments. Trauma is a particularly fascinating lens through which to explore these issues because it allows me to interconnect two key concepts: the intimacy of corporeal and psychical precariousness, and the digitalization and virtuality which characterize (and destabilize) contemporary experiences of the real. I interrogate the fundamental idea of traumatic unspeakability by exploring the ways in which the materiality of the body becomes an affective basis for a textual ethics of empathy. I thus work at the intersection of trauma studies, affect theory, literary studies, and the ethics of (reading) literature in order to demonstrate that multi-dimensional textual patterns and referentialities subvert the paradigm of traumatic non-representability in post-9/11 texts.

I demonstrate this ethical (and, at times, political) aesthetic of trauma literature in a series of textual readings, and I select texts that are formally and imaginatively as well as geographically various. The grotesque and liberating laughter of Spiegelman’s comix turns trauma into a strategy of critique, and emphasizes the importance of imaginative transformation, indeterminacy and flexibility over the rigid discourses of redemption. Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, on the other hand, interrogates an embodied ethics of affect and focuses on the paradox between individuality and community which inheres in trauma. The transnational as well as transhistorical embedding of 9/11 is directly reflected in my chapter on J.S. Foer, in which I relate his intertextual strategies and multiple narrative perspectives to the question of the singularity of 9/11, but William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition is the text which turns 9/11 into an event of the global marketplace. Whether representation entails commodification has been a central question of trauma theory since Adorno. Gibson counters the Baudrillardian complicity of 9/11 when he traces the corporeal wound through the layers of code which engulf his fictional world.

Katharina Donn, University of Augsburg
“Migration and the Grotesque in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.”
Crossing Borders: Ways of Constructing Identities. Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, University of Augsburg. 10-12 May, 2012.

Even if Rushdie’s riotously hybrid and controversial Satanic Verses eludes formulaic reductions, there can be little discussion about the fact that the experience of migration and the traversing of boundaries, be they generic, geographical or (meta)physical, constitutes a key theme in the novel; I propose to approach Rushdie’s migrant identities and hybrid narrative patterns through the concept of the grotesque.
Understood as a phenomenon of crossing and transforming boundaries that is essentially tied to physical corporality, the grotesque allows envisaging the “angelicdevilish” protagonists’ migration as a transmutation that combines an allegorical note on the migrant’s self-estrangement with its emphatic physical actuality between the uncanny and the laughable. An even more important implication of interpreting migration as grotesque metamorphosis, though, is the concept’s performative dimension. Since Michail Bakhtin’s embedding of the grotesque in the carnivalesque, its proximity to sociocultural critique and capacity of mediating cultural change has lent a component of cultural energy to the grotesque that its playful mutations alone could not account for. In Satanic Verses, the migrants are thus empowered, by way of their grotesque features, not only to cross but effectively to displace borders; their chimerical forms question culturally fundamental categories such as, most obviously, the human - divine or heavenly - satanic dichotomies and open up these borderlines into spaces of hybridity and creative energy.
The grotesqueness of migration in Satanic Verses is therefore more than a form of postmodern playfulness; through its processes of merging and renewed formation, the dynamic of such postcolonial literature centers on the socially marginalized and transforms it into a prism for patterns of cultural flexibility.

What does it mean to be human in a world that is both viral and vulnerable? The current pandemic has made clear that we live porous lives in a porous world of bacteria, microbes, viruses, organic bodies, and non-organic matter. In this article I explore the ethical and embodied conflicts this exposes us to, proposing that the motif of human and posthuman skin in speculative fiction re-assesses the relation between exposure and agency. In near-future worlds of ecological, socio-economic and viral breakdown, the vulnerable and porous human epidermis becomes a key site for probing the ethics of an ecologically enmeshed concept of human selfhood. The posthuman subjects of the feminist speculative fiction by Larissa Lai and Rita Indiana are deeply immersed - for better and worse - in the toxic realities they inhabit; but importantly, they also explore ways to navigate this entanglement and develop both agency and health within such exposure, salvaging sustainable futures for humanity on ...

This essay extends ecocritical research on trauma and Virginia Woolf in order to define the role of nature in modernist trauma literature. An ecocritical reading takes modernist literary landscapes beyond the wasteland and uncovers their generative energy. These organic narrative patterns and tropes establish potentials of meaning and cultural energy, but their effect is far from therapeutic. Rather, it is disruptive, at times almost violent, but because nature still retains its cyclic properties, it offers a space which integrates traumatic collapse and creative renewal simultaneously.Therefore, an ecocritical reading of Woolf’s texts challenges a controversial premise of trauma studies, namely the notion that trauma lead to a “breakage of verse” (Felman), when it emphasizes the epistemological possibilities and metaphoric potentials which natural elements bring to the texts. This essay thus aims to contribute to the definition of an ecology of violence in aesthetic as well as in ethical terms.

The pathology of trauma pervades Siri Hustvedt’s texts in general, takes center-stage in her post-9/11 novel, Sorrows of an American. The repercussions of trauma in Hustvedt’s text, however, are notable not only for their psychological impact, but question the possibility of knowledge in the post-traumatic aftermath itself. In this essay, I propose a detailed reading of trauma in Sorrows of an American in order to demonstrate this complex balance of different modes of knowing. Hustvedt delicately negotiates the more scientific truth claims of clinical knowledge against forms of understanding that are based on affect and move beyond the rational. Beyond a pathology of memory alone, the crisis of trauma therefore unsettles notions of knowledge and truth. Sorrows of an American transforms trauma into an epistemological shock, in which the overwhelming affectivity of trauma, and the highly synesthetic and corporeal forms of perception this engenders, increasingly destabilize the ontological certainties of psychoanalytical models or the empirical gaze.

I explore the mutually enriching dialogue between the grotesque (based on Mikhail Bakhtin) and postcolonial literature that provides a leitmotif in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses on multiple levels: first and foremost, it defines the migrant protagonists’ experience as one of metamorphosis, transgression and change; in the grotesque just as in the experience of migration, the familiar and the unfamiliar conflate, and this is foregrounded in The Satanic Verses in striking manner: the protagonists Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta transform physically into grotesquely jointed creatures, one an incarnation of the archangelic divine, the other a goatish Satan. In so, the often violent physicality of the grotesque foregrounds the migrant’s identity formation to be one in which the self not only encounters, but physically integrates and eventually transforms constructions of alterity. In very concise terms, identity here emerges to be a relational process, and this is the reason, too, why the grotesque has been hailed as a new form of postcolonial ethics (Majumdar 99) concerned with representations of alterity. The grotesque, however, is also a transformatory force, which overtopples hierarchies and binary oppositions. In The Satanic Verses, the migrant protagonists are thus empowered, by way of their transformations, not only to cross but temporarily to displace borders; their chimerical forms interact with the narrative structure and multiple voices of the text to question the value of cultural hierarchies and divides. The grotesque opens up these borderlines into spaces of hybridity and creative energy, and takes effect, too, on the discourses of fundamentalism that are deconstructed in the text itself and became decisive in the notoriously dramatic aftermath of its publication.

One of the most shocking instances of large-scale terrorism in recent history, and simultaneously the one most immediately distributed by a global media culture, the attacks on September 11th, 2001 make it necessary to reconsider the ethics of witnessing that can be applied to such events. How can cultural expressions which respond to large-scale violence – traumatic to the individuals directly involved, but also firmly embedded into a discourse of national trauma on a more collective scale – be assessed as regards the role of the witness, the construction of alterity, and their underlying aesthetics and ethics in relation to broader socio-cultural and political discourses about the attacks?
In my essay, I propose to approach this problem through the prism of comix and sequential art. Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers represents one tendency here that foregrounds the generic potential of the graphic format to provide a meta-discursive space for reassembling meaning and identity, in ways anticipated in models of cultural ecology and a politicized aesthetic. The experience of 9/11 leaves a shattering impact in these visually hybrid and intertextually charged cartoon panels; through this collapse, though, a form of witnessing emerges which meta-fictionally reflects on the limits of representing experiences of terror, re-evaluates prior certainties, and provides a space to re-integrate emotional upheaval and critical reflection through the perspective of the traumatised author-protagonist. Other comicbook responses, and notably superhero comics such as the Amazing Spiderman 9/11 special edition, form a contrastive foil to this self-reflexive approach in that they do not so much acknowledge as displace the repercussions of the experience of terror. By sublimating it into an unspeakable beyond, the rhetoric of heroism, unity and strength surfaces and forms a turn towards redemption after the initial shock, which is further enforced by a clear construct of the terrorists’ absolute alterity.

9/11 fictional literature shows a striking propensity to conjure up other, historically older traumata and intertextual references in an associative framework which moreover introduces into the texts an oscillation between narrative representation and indexical reference, and which I will exemplify in a reading of J.S. Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. Based on an understanding of trauma as a structure of reception rather than a phenomenon essentially linked to specific events, trauma in my approach emerges not only as an interpretational framework for dealing with the aesthetics and psychology of post-9/11 fiction, but also as an intercultural and diachronic link which fictional literature experiments with. Working with the model of multidirectional collective memory developed by Michael Rothberg, this specific quality of intertextuality and intergenerational dialogue gives rise to the impression that the memorialization of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, functions in a more dynamic way than it at first glance appears to do. In this contemporary context, literary trauma therefore emerges not primarily as an un-representable void, but must rather be described in terms of a productive, albeit liminal in-between space of both individual and cultural remembering and aesthetic representation.

Katharina Donn, University of Augsburg
“Unsettled Places and Cultural Ecology: Modernist Trauma Literature.”
Modernism NOW! British Association for Modernist Studies, International Conference 2014.
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London. 26–28 June 2014.

When trauma first became a mass diagnosis in World War I, it arose from the trenches of an industrialized warfare that left soldiers physically and mentally maimed, and scarred the landscape for years to come. Post - world war modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway respond to this conspicuous interrelation between trauma and the natural landscape in their texts; in effect, they subvert such conventional and culturally stabilizing notions of nature as the pastoral idyll or the sublime encounter, and turn it into a performative materialization of traumatic disorientation, displacement and unrest. In my contribution to the Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, I propose to take this relation between trauma and the ecologies of place in two directions: first and foremost, such modernist trauma texts unsettle notions of place, so often associated with rootedness, as they foreground the palimpsestic layering and uncanny forcefulness of absent memory which inhere in their literary landscapes. While this, of course, leads me to critically evaluate such central ecocritical concepts as space and place, texts such as Virginia Woolf’s The Waves or Ernest Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River also open up a much broader and fascinating trajectory into the ecological study of trauma literature: they gauge the specific potential of imaginative literature in times of trauma, and thus lead into the field of cultural ecology; originating in a time when trauma was first acknowledged as wide-spread pathology and became one of the hallmarks of modernist awareness, these fictional landscapes are more than mere extrapolations of psychic distress: charged with suffering though they are, the fictional manifestations of natural spaces and organic processes here also enable the creative renewal of memory and literary representation.

Katharina Donn, University of Augsburg
“Lost in Space: Flânerie as Urban Epistemology in Times of Terror.”
Arts of the City ASAP/5. Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Wayne State University, Detroit. 3-5 October, 2013.

The flâneur, an embodiment of urban experience originating in 19th century Paris, continues to stroll through contemporary debates on metropolitan life. While this figure is often reduced to a mannerist, turtle-walking dandy, I argue for the productivity of flânerie in recent imaginative texts and understand it not as a historical type, but as a specific and creative mode of perceiving the city. Its potential crystallizes in a significant context: Flânerie re-surfaces in contemporary literature on terrorism in the urban space, and I accordingly propose to explore the various wanderers who, traumatized and disoriented, pervade J.S. Foer’s, Don DeLillo’s, or William Gibson’s prominent novels on the 2001 attacks. From these individualized figures, I work towards an epistemology of the urban in times of terror. In his seminal Passagen-Werk, Walter Benjamin gives the reason why flânerie provides an especially promising theoretical framework for such a project: it emerges from the experience of crisis and develops an alternative vision on urban spaces in upheaval. Flâneurs tie the materiality of the cityscape, which the 2001 terrorist attacks brought back with force after its suspension in postmodern hyperrealities, to spaces of memory, the imagination and artistic representation; they advocate the openness of the free glance in search for subtle patterns of deeper meaning to respond to alienation, angst and transience, in ways that make tangible the creative potential of the literary trauma victim adrift in city spaces; and they keep an ironic distance from urban consumerism, whether of goods, or, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, of the media terrorist spectacle. Flânerie and literary trauma therefore enter into a relation that is both challenging and illuminating, and combine to make the city a space of threat, but also of imaginative possibility and renewed sensitivity. They embed individual practices of being in and walking through the city within contemporary, post-traumatic urban ecologies of memory and meaning.

Katharina Donn, University of Augsburg
“Witnessing Terror: Graphic Responses to 9/11.”
Fear, Horror and Terror. 6th Global Conference.Inter-Disciplinary.Net. Mansfield College, Oxford. 7-9 September, 2012.

One of the most shocking instances of large-scale terrorism in recent history, and, simultaneously, the one most immediately distributed by a global media culture, the attacks on September 11th, 2001 make it necessary to reconsider the ethics of witnessing such events. How can cultural responses to 9/11 help us gauge the role of the witness, constructions of alterity, and the underlying ethics of witnessing terror?
In my paper, I propose to approach this problem through the prism of artistic, visually-graphic responses. Art Spiegelman’s “In the Shadow of No Towers” exemplifies one tendency here, which foregrounds the generic potential of the graphic format to provide a specific metadiscursive space for reassembling meaning and identity in ways anticipated in models of cultural ecology (Hubert Zapf, 2002) and a politicized aesthetic (Isobel Armstrong, 2000). The experience of 9/11 leaves a shattering impact in these visually hybrid and intertextually charged cartoon panels; through this collapse, though, a form of witnessing emerges which meta-fictionally reflects on the limits of representing experiences of terror, re-evaluates prior certainties, and provides a space in which to re-integrate emotional upheaval and critical distance. Other responses in the form of cartoons, and notably superhero comics such as the “Amazing Spiderman” 9/11 special edition, constitute a contrastive foil to this self-reflexive approach in that they do not so much acknowledge as displace the repercussions of the experience of terror, itself sublimated into an unspeakable beyond, by a rhetoric of heroism, unity and strength, which is further enforced by a clear construction of the terrorists’ absolute alterity.

Katharina Donn, University of Augsburg
“’Where Personal History and World History collide’: Networks of Trauma.”
Beyond Trauma: Narratives of (Im)Possibility. University of Zaragoza. 31 March – 2 April, 2011.

9/11 fictional literature shows a striking propensity to conjure up other, historically older traumata and intertextual references, so that texts begin to oscillate between narrative representation and indexical reference. I will exemplify this in a reading of J.S. Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. Based on an understanding of trauma as a structure of reception rather than a phenomenon essentially linked to specific events, trauma emerges not only as an interpretational framework for dealing with the aesthetics and psychology of post-9/11 fiction, but also as an intercultural and diachronic link which fictional literature experiments with. Working with the model of multidirectional collective memory developed by Michael Rothberg, this specific quality of intertextuality and intergenerational dialogue gives rise to the impression that the memorialization of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, functions in a more dynamic way than it at first glance appears to do. In this contemporary context, literary trauma therefore emerges not primarily as an un-representable void, but must rather be described in terms of a productive, albeit liminal in-between space of both individual and cultural remembering and aesthetic representation.