Crossing Over and In Between: The Caesura of Traumatic Memory and Working Through in Poetry and Image

• In Event: 64.088 - Sheraton Roundtable 12 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 64.088-1 - Space and Place: Embodied and Performed

Abstract

Following the call for multimodal narratives as a way to "democratize evidence," this paper poses the question of how a traumatic past may be represented through a strategy of intergenerational, interpsychic displacement. I present the case of one reader, a preservice teacher using poetry and art to respond to a difficult text (Lynda Barry’s The Freddie Stories), and sharing similarly difficult details about herself, though interwoven with a story about a family member she had never met. In my examination of this reader’s encounter with difficult knowledge, I turn to psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s concept of the caesura, as a way to allow for the possibility of that which is not immediately comprehensible about the past.

Author

• David Lewkowich, University of Alberta