Multi-dimensional Traumatic Aesthetics in Craig Wright's Grace | ||||
| هرمس | ||||
| Article 7, Volume 11, Issue 3 - Serial Number 41, July 2022, Page 185-206 PDF (738.72 K) | ||||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/herms.2022.248436 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
| Mahmoud El Bagoury | ||||
| Lecturer of English Literature, Faculty of Arts, Suez University | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| This study points out how the American playwright Craig Wright's Grace is replete with multi-dimensional traumatic aesthetics: physical, existential, emotional, and psychological. The aesthetics of trauma are reflections on the varied dimensions associated with traumatic experiences. The play demonstrates that traumatic aesthetics can plunge man into an existential void which distorts his beliefs, disrupts his cognitive equilibrium, and fragments his perception of human existence, self, emotions, and memories. Physical trauma has been existentialized to disclose the characters' distorted beliefs, existential anxiety, and alienation. Emotional trauma has been existentialized to unfold the characters' perspective on the futility of life, skepticism, and self-abhorrence. Psychological trauma has been contextualized to divulge the bitter effects of trauma on the characters' psyche. Grace is a dark play which dives deeply into the nature of suffering and the existential anguish of disappointed faith through the eyes of a young couple, Steve and Sara, their next-door neighbor, Sam, and the building's German exterminator, Karl. As their stories converge, Wright's characters find themselves face-to-face with their traumas. The traumatic effects include distressing memories, negative flashbacks, existential anxiety, distorted beliefs, and alienation. The play ends with three dead bodies. Steve's broken faith instigates him to kill Sara, Sam and himself. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| Trauma; existential anxiety; alienation; post-traumatic stress disorder; fragmentation; addiction to trauma; traumatic memory | ||||
| References | ||||
|
Balaev, Michelle. "Literary Trauma Theory Reconsidered." Contemporary Approaches in Literary Trauma Theory. Ed. Michelle Balaev. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Barnes, Wesley. The Philosophy and Literature of Existentialism. USA: Barron's Educational Series, Inc. 1968. Bein, Alex. "The Jewish Parasite: Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem ,with special Reference to Germany." Available at: http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/ at The University of Alberta on July 15, 2015. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. The John Hopkins UP, 1996. Durkheim, Emile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Trans. John A. Spalding and George Simpson. New York: The Free Press, 1951. Forter, Greg. “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form." Narrative 15 (2007): 259–285. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961. Harper, Julie Rea. “PTSD: A Situated Look at the Semiotic Process and Role of Individual Umwelts in Human Existence/Function.” Semiotica 157, 2005: 377-385. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1927. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. BasicBooks, 1992. Laub, Dori. "No One Bears Witness to the Witness." In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Eds. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. New York: Routledge, 1991. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. Summit Books, 1985. Mann, Sarah J. "Alternative Perspective on the Student Experience: Alienation and Engagement." Studies in Higher Education, 26, 2001: 7-13. McNally, Richard J. Remembering Trauma. Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2003. Mollica, Richard F. Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World. Harcourt, Inc. 2006. Romansaka, Magda. The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantori: History and Holocaust in Akropolis and Dead Class. London: Anthem, 2012. Santner, Eric. On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Schacter, Daniel L. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. Sexton, Anne. The Book of Folly. The Complete Poems. Boston and New York: A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. London: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Stolorow, Robert D. "The Contextuality and Existentiality of Emotional Trauma." Psychoanalytic Dialogues 18, 2008: 113-123. Van der Kolk, Bessel. "Inescapable Shock, Neurotransmitters, and Addiction to Trauma: Toward a Psychobiology of Post-Traumatic Stress." Biological Psychiatry, 1985. Van der Kolk, Bessel and C. P. Ducey. "The Psychological Processing of Traumatic Experience: Rorschach Patterns in PTSD." Journal of Traumatic Stress, 1989. 2: 259-274. Van der Kolk, Bessel and Onno van der Hart. "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma." Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995: 158-82. Wright, Craig. Grace. New York: Dramatists Play Service INC, 2010. | ||||
|
Statistics Article View: 188 PDF Download: 113 |
||||
