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A Traumatizing Proposal

After much struggling I am still falling short of an actual project idea.  I would like to link my study of trauma with visual rhetoric.  I think that some of the work on mirror neurons would be helpful in better understanding how people understand, process and react to traumas. In my thesis I looked at visual representations of trauma in film and that certainly has potential for continued research.  I would like to further explore how traumas might be represented in "new media" by searching for examples on YouTube and possibly considering how traumatic events might be represented in virtual worlds like Second Life.  I'm going to continue looking into these and elaborate further.

Submitted by rhetoricat on Thu, 2007-01-25 11:51.
rhetoricat's blog

Memorial videos as VizRhet
Amylea's picture
Submitted by Amylea on Tue, 2007-01-30 10:49.

Cat
What about 9/11 memorial videos (on YouTube and personal websites)? I'd be interested to see the difference between ones made "professionally" by some dude at Fox News and ones made for personal use by amateurs. Are the images the same? Sequence? How would you personalize such a public trauma when all the images are pubic domain?


Virtual Black Eyes and Other Self-Inflicted Wounds
mark p's picture
Submitted by mark p on Tue, 2007-01-30 10:44.

I don't know what you can make of this, (I'll leave that to you, my goal is only to point out) but in Second Life one can actually purchase badges of trauma for their avatars. Meaning you can choose to walk around in blood stained clothes, choose to have a black eye, even put on casts and other visual markers of injury. Why do this? Who knows, everyone probably has there own reason that relates to how they choose to roleplay, but I think it's fascinating.


Trauma in Film and New Media
David Blakesley's picture
Submitted by David Blakesley on Tue, 2007-01-30 09:36.

Rhetoricat:

This all sounds promising. I think it would be easier to focus on film, of course, since there are quite a number (ones you might not have discussed before) that would be good examples of how Hollywood represents trauma and its permutations. Even the various 9/11 films could be an interesting focus.

If you go out to YouTube and Internet sources, you might want to restrict your focus in advance (without ruling out possibilities too stringently) since there is so much out there. Perhaps picking a "source" would be helpful (particular events, types of trauma) for focusing things.

Marguerite Helmers has done some good work on popular responses to Diana's death. Joyce Walker has also written about trauma with respect to the Internet. See

http://www.stpt.usf.edu/coas/english/Faculty_Information/Joyce_Walker.ht...