All garden entries tagged with "trauma".
10 entries across the garden
While Cathy Caruth’s 1990s model was foundational for bringing trauma into literary criticism, it faced heavy pushback starting in the late 1990s and 2000s. Critics from psychology, history, and postcolonial studies argued that her definition of trauma was too narrow, politically limited, and overly reliant on Western, white, and middle-class frameworks. The primary criticisms and […]
Six books in, the Dungeon Crawler Carl series keeps proving it’s smarter than its absurdist premise suggests, and Gate of the Feral Gods might be the darkest entry yet. Dinniman continues to use the game-show dungeon as a brutally effective metaphor for systems that consume the people trapped inside them, and this installment leans hard […]
There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes from opening an 800-page anthology set in one of horror fiction’s most beloved universes. The Stand is at turns tragic and funny, romantic and gross, sentimental and nihilistic — a pandemic story, a Christian allegory, and an attempt to craft a distinctly American epic fantasy all at […]
“We Don’t Talk About Carol” by Kristen L. Berry is an engaging and thought-provoking family drama that explores the complexities of sibling relationships and long-buried secrets. Through Sydney’s grueling IVF journey, the book deeply examines the visceral desires, vulnerabilities, and identity crises tied to trying to conceive and build a foundation for the future. The […]
In the third book of Matt Dinniman’s chaotic LitRPG series, Carl and Princess Donut find themselves on the Fourth Floor of the World Dungeon: The Iron Tangle. This floor is a massive, mind-bending network of subway tunnels and shifting train lines that require intense logistical planning to navigate. While dodging the usual array of homicidal […]
Avana Gray’s I, Medusa offers a compelling reimagining of the classic Greek myth, centering Medusa’s perspective in a narrative about transformation, trauma, and reclaiming power. The novel follows Medusa’s journey from a young woman devoted to Athena’s temple to her infamous transformation into the snake-haired Gorgon. Gray explores how Medusa’s monstrous form emerges not from […]
Annalee Newitz’s delightful novella, Automatic Noodle, is a masterfully crafted piece of near-future speculative fiction that manages to be both deeply comforting and razor-sharp. It seamlessly balances the warmth of “cozy sci-fi” with a thoughtful, hard-hitting exploration of freedom, dignity, and systemic prejudice. The story takes place in a San Francisco working to rebuild itself […]
The article provides a comprehensive overview of Trauma Studies as a field of literary theory and criticism, tracing its evolution from its 19th-century psychoanalytic roots to contemporary literary frameworks. The core concepts and historical shifts detailed in the article can be broken down as follows: Foundations in Freudian Psychoanalysis The field’s core psychological concepts rely […]
What does it mean to be hurt by the world — and to carry that hurt forward? Five recent books, wildly different in form and register, circle this question from opposite ends of the literary spectrum. The End of the World As We Know It is at turns tragic and funny, romantic and gross, sentimental […]
Trauma theory began, as so much of modern literary criticism does, with Freud. In Studies on Hysteria, he and Joseph Breuer proposed that an extreme event isn’t traumatic in the moment so much as it becomes traumatic later, surfacing during a latency period when some unrelated trigger calls the repressed memory back up. Decades later, […]
