Event date: Wednesday 1 December 2010, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, English Department Meeting Room (third floor, room 130.037 / 3.11)

“Teaching Trauma: From Confession to Testimony” given by Professor Dawn Skorczewski (Brandeis University)

“This speaker focuses on a pedagogical dilemma: how to teach texts that represent trauma? A course on Trauma and Memory in the Literary Imagination draws students who are interested in literature and, quite often, in their own difficult life experiences. The literature of trauma can be disturbing to read; students respond viscerally to the texts and to each other. Just as speaking about trauma to others places the victim in a potential situation of re-experiencing the original trauma and its effects, reading about trauma can have the same effect. As an instructor of this course, I struggled to help students read the literature carefully without neglecting or simply surrendering to their own personal responses to it.

My pedagogy in the course evolved from a confessional to a testimonial approach. I first encouraged students to appreciate the value of speaking about trauma as a liberating act. After seeing the limitations of this approach, I came to emphasize listening to trauma, in the manner of somewhat knowledgeable witnesses, as the focus of the course. Organizing the course around ways of listening to trauma rather than on acts of speaking out about it shifted the focus from one of hearing confessions to witnessing the testimonies of others. This reframing of my instructional approach is informed by recent research that distinguishes between confessional theories of literature and those of testimony or witness.”

Dawn Skorczewski is Associate Professor of English and Director of University Writing at Brandeis University. She is the author of Teaching One Moment at a Time: Disruption and Repair in the Classroom as well as numerous articles about psychoanalysis, trauma, and teaching. Her forthcoming book,Anne Sexton’s Secrets (Routledge, 2011), examines the final six months of recorded psychotherapy between Anne Sexton, America’s first woman confessional poet, and Dr. Martin Orne, her psychiatrist. Dawn has won awards for teaching from Harvard University and for writing from the American Psychoanalytic Association.