本文是一篇英语论文，本文以朱迪思•赫尔曼的创伤理论为基础，对桑塔格短篇小说《朝圣》《中国之行》《心问》《宝贝》《旧怨重提》和《美国魂》进行详细解读，通过分析女性在不同人生阶段中所经受的创伤和治愈途径，探索了桑塔格在个人，家庭和社会三个方面对女性创伤的理解。
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Susan Sontag and Her Short Stories
Susan Sontag, an American writer, playwright, filmmaker, public intellectual and political activist, is known as “one of the most important female intellectuals in the West”. She has a wide range of research fields, including aesthetics, literary theories, novels, short stories, plays and so on. Almost all of her works have been translated and published in China. Besides, she has won many honors and awards, including National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award and Jerusalem Prize.
英语论文怎么写
Susan Sontag is well known for her literary criticism, and the study on her mainly focuses on a series of her aesthetic thoughts. However, she is happy to be called a novelist, although her fictional works are not recognized by the academic circle in the early days. Starting from the 1960s, Sontag’s short stories appear in Partisan Review, American Review, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and Playboy. Eight stories are first published as a collection titled I, etcetera in 1978. At the end of 2017, a new collection of Sontag’s short stories, which is edited by Benjamin Taylor with the title “Debriefing”, is released. The new collection adds three known short stories to the original edition to form a complete collection of Sontag’s short stories.
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1.2 Literature Review
1.2.1 Overseas Research on Susan Sontag’s Short Stories
Since the 1990s, great progress has been made in the study of Susan Sontag’s short stories. These studies can be roughly pided into three categories: the first is the short stories embodied in the study of Susan Sontag’s life; the second is the short stories included in reviews; the third is short stories appearing in academic journals.
The first category is the short stories involved in the study of Susan Sontag’s life. In the study of Sontag’s life, biography and diary served as two kinds of life study are related to short stories. First, the biography Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, co-authored by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock (2000), documents Sontag’s extraordinary life by referring to Susan Sontag’s published works and interviews with her friends. This biography provides a realistic basis for the study of her short stories. Because the biography records Sontag’s mental journey after the loss of her father in childhood, as well as her experience of meeting Thomas Mann. And this experience is reflected in Susan Sontag’s short stories “Project for a Trip to China” and “Pilgrimage” respectively. Secondly, Sontag’s diary reveals how short stories are created. The diary As Consciousness is harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980 (2015) records the creative inspiration of the short story “Baby”, as well as the author’s positive assessment of the creation of short stories. Through the diary, a shadow of Sontag in the short stories is embodied.
The life study of Susan Sontag demonstrates her creative inspiration for short stories and her real experience contained in short stories, which, to a certain extent, can be used as areference to understand her short stories from a private perspective and thus pave the way for the study of her short stories.
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Chapter 2 The Trauma of a Desert Childhood
2.1 Frustrated Searching: The Death of Father
“Project for a Trip to China” contains Sontag’s real growth experience. In the short story, the narrator says that “I was conceived in China though born in New York and brought up elsewhere (America)” (Sontag, 1991)5. Actually, in the author’s real life, her parents did business at that time in China when she was conceived. And when she was five years old, her father “died of pulmonary tuberculosis in the German American Hospital in Tientsin, China” (Rollyson, et al., 2016)4. The heroine in the story claims that she has never been to China, but it is the death of her father in China that has made her have special feelings for China from an early age. And this is the reason why she has always wanted to go to China.
The first aspect of the trauma is about the death of the heroine’s father. The heroine has never been to China, though she is conceived in China. This means that she misses China where her parents lived at that time. For her, “going to China is tantamount to stitching up the pided history of “I” and integrating the pided and suspended self at the same time” (ZhangLi, 2011)113. What’s more, her father dies in China when she is a little child without knowing anything. Therefore, going to China to some extent is her emotional reaction to the loss of her father. And the whole story can be seen as a monologue saying that she wants to go to China. To some extent, this monologue is more like a raving talk. The reason why it is like that is not that the heroine has an illusion, but she is constantly disturbed by traumatic memories——the death of her father.
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2.2 Flash: The Indelible Memory
Everything about China flashes in the heroine’s mind when traumatic memories of the death of her father hit her. And this reflects her miserable situation. In Judith Herman’s view, people who have experienced trauma will be attacked by traumatic memories. Herman mentioned that “they cannot resume the normal course of their lives, for the trauma repeatedly interrupts……Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event” (2015)37. For example, the heroine always thinks about the things that may correspond to nouns of locality such as east, south, west and north of China. She gives different directions different feelings. She thinks “center” represents “sympathy”, and she is willing to be in the center. The direction without having any emotion is bestowed on different feelings by her. It seems that what she has done is just for having some connection with China. But actually, this is the symptom of trauma——intrusion. And what she does reflects that she is constantly troubled by the death of her father.
In addition, fragmented memories about China impact how she thinks about things. Though she can think of everything about China in her mind, there is no connection between them. Because “traumatic memories lack verbal narrative and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images” (Brett, 1985). For example, the heroine mentions at the beginning of the story that “I will walk across the Luhu Bridge spanning the Sham Chun River between Hong Kong and ”(Sontag, 1991)3, and calls the “Luohu Bridge”, “Sham Chun River”, “Hong Kong”, “” ,“peaked cloth caps” and “five variables” and thinks about other possible sequences of them. The heroine’s setting is her imagination about the beginning of her trip to China, which reflects her traumatic memory of China’s geographical location. And because the memory repeats in fragments, there seems to be no connection between the nouns. These fragmented associations bear witness to the fact that traumatic memories continue to harass the heroine. If it euphemistically expresses the intrusion of the heroine’s traumatic memory in this way, then the following things show more directly that a common scene in her life can arouse her trauma. The heroine says: “I still weep in any movie with a scene in which a father returns home after a long desperate absence, at the moment when he hugs his child. Or children” (Sontag, 1991)11. This not only reflects the impact of the traumatic events on her, but also indicates that it is hard for her to release herself from her father’s death. And when talking about the purpose of going to China, she says that “He died so far away. By visiting my father’s death, I make him heavier. I will bury him myself” (Sontag, 1991)19. This may be the reason why she wants to go to China. For her, only when she “goes” to China can her trauma be healed.
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Chapter 3 The Trauma of the Fragmented Family ................................... 20
3.1 The Painful Marriage: A Non-existent Family .................................... 20
3.2 Hyperarousal: Endless Terror ................................ 23
3.3 Reconstructing Traumatic Experience: Mourning ......................... 27
Chapter 4 The Trauma of the Confusing Era ........................................... 32
4.1 The Lost Society: A Spiritual Prisoner ............................ 32
4.2 Intrusion: Unspeakable Anxiety ............................... 38
4.3 Reconnecting with the World: The Awakening of Consciousness .................. 41
Chapter 5 Conclusion ....................... 45
Chapter 4 The Trauma of the Confusing Era
4.1 The Lost Society: A Spiritual Prisoner
Since the 1970s, American cults have begun to prevail, and the fundamental reason is people’s spiritual confusion and emptiness. Therefore, cults can be regarded as “companions of social belief crisis” (Wang Yuxia, 2003)168. “Old Complaints Revisited” tells the story of a member of a cult who is hesitant to withdraw from the organization. When she is a teenager, she becomes interested in the organization because of the attraction of her relatives as a member of the organization and the worship of the professor who is also a cult member in college. And after understanding the nature of the organization, she is determined to join the organization. However, after joining the organization, she gradually becomes sober because she witnesses the obscenity and meanness of the organization. But after waking up, she is afraid to leave under the pressure of the organization. Therefore, she is in a state of hesitationwhen she wants to leave the organization.
英语论文参考
The hesitation of the heroine indicates the organization’s long-term imprisonment. “In situations of captivity, the perpetrator becomes the person by the in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the most powerful victim is shaped actions and beliefs of the perpetrator” (Herman, 2015)75. To make the members of the organization submit to the organization, the perpetrators are used to using the means of psychological domination.
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Chapter 5 Conclusion
Combined with her special personal experience, Susan Sontag gives a detailed description of women’s trauma and how they heal from it in short stories. In this thesis, the trauma embodied in six short stories is pided into three categories, which are childhood trauma, family trauma and social trauma. Through the analysis of the text, it is found that Sontag’s six short stories cover different traumatic experiences, and different traumatic experiences determine different ways of trauma healing.
First of all, the ways of trauma healing in different short stories are different. In “Project for a Trip to China” and “Pilgrimage”, in the face of the trauma of losing her father, the protagonist establishes a safe environment by visiting her literary icon. The protagonists in “Baby” and “Debriefing” have experienced varying degrees of loss in the marriage. In the face of trauma, the protagonist in “Debriefing” fails to get out of the trauma because of her refusal to mourn, while the heroine in “Baby” walks out of the traumatic predicament through positive narration and transforming traumatic memory. The “American Spirits” and “Old Complaints Revisited” reflect the trauma of women’s survival in the context of the era. To heal from trauma, they constantly try to establish contact with the outside world, and their trauma has been alleviated in the process. Thus it can be seen that the characters in the short stories have experienced different trauma in different life stages.
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