Art and Literature: Guiding Journalists in Trauma's Portrayal

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E. Ann Kaplan is a distinguished professor of English and comparative literary and cultural studies at Stony Brook University. A literary and film scholar, she has written several books and papers about how trauma is portrayed in various media, including "Trauma Culture: The Polities of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature." In this presentation her focus was on "art that addresses the ethical and aesthetic challenges of representing trauma." In opening her remarks, she asked, "If trauma is not cognitively accessible or available in memory, how can we make art about it?" She observed that the artistic process of representing trauma is about 'finding ways to preserve its horror while organizing," the aesthetic experience so that spectators can take it in and grow from what is shown."

The difficulty lies in finding aesthetic strategies appropriate to constructing a position for the viewer--and this is very important--that enables the viewer to take responsibility, and secondly, for creating a witness where there was none before. Yet in some representations of trauma there is a danger of what I call "empty empathy." On the other hand, there is the danger of sensationalizing trauma so that audiences are vicariously traumatized--that is, they experience secondary trauma--and turn away in shock. So if the danger is what one critic calls "unwanted beauty" in works dealing with catastrophes, then trivializing through a too-easy aesthetic access is another.

In some works of art one finds an element of trauma's elusiveness and subversion of reality. These works arguably position the viewer as a witness to …