Mixing memory with trauma in the works of Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Malcolm Lowry

Drawing on Freud's writing on trauma and recent trauma studies, this dissertation addresses the idea of modernist literature as a literature of trauma. I argue that both Freud and modernist writers, in their encounter with the overwhelming historical traumas of the twentieth century, register an intense awareness of the catastrophic effects of historical trauma on the individual psyche. Reading modernist texts along with Freud's writing on trauma, this dissertation does not investigate how their writing is a traumatic symptom of the war. First, this dissertation investigates what it means for modernist writers to conceptualize history as the history of trauma.{09}Second, it investigates how their writing has internalized the shocking and unresolved nature of traumatic history in formal devices such as modernist narrative. I argue that modernist narrative employs a peculiar form of non-linearity, blurring all distinctions between past, present, and future, and constant circling around loss to inhabit history through the symptomology of trauma. These essentially formal devices manifest not just as aesthetic representations, but also as unmediated repetitions of a trauma that has yet to be worked through.