Reading literary trauma: a narratological approach

This dissertation complicates conceptions of how people read fiction by combining cognitive narratology with trauma theory to analyze fictional representations of trauma. Like other cognitive narratologists, I explore how fiction prompts reader imagination and visualization, although I redirect attention to literary trauma, when textual prompts most conflict with each other. Focusing on work by Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, and Flannery O’Connor, I trace how textual prompts encourage reader projection and displacement at once, thus eliciting audience investment and recoil. By focusing on this fluid, ambiguous relationship between reader and text, I emphasize the ethical dimensions of reader-text transactions, a discussion that is underdeveloped in traditional cognitive approaches.