Our April 2026 LMCC meeting took place on Wednesday, April 22 at 5:30pm strictly over Zoom. 
We discussed an ongoing debate around trauma studies. Specifically, we asked everyone to focus on the following:
- “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” by Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker (Dec. 27, 2021)
- “A Posthumous Shock: How Everything Became Trauma” by Will Self, Harper’s Magazine (Dec. 2021)
- Suggested optional reading: “‘They’re selling everything as trauma’: How Our Emotional Pain Became a Product” by Katherine Rowland, The Guardian (Dec. 14, 2025)
If you missed the meeting, you can still access the texts on the Readings page of this site! You can also access the recording of our meeting here.
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- Also, please feel free to spread the word about LMCC to other interested graduate or professional students at UNC.
This was our final meeting of the semester and of the 2025-2026 academic year! Enjoy your summer and look out for our updates regarding meetings for the fall 2026!
Important Note: After this April 2026 meeting, LMCC Co-Directors Paul Blom and Mindy Buchanan-King will step down from LMCC. We are currently working to solidify new leadership for the group, and we will assist them in this leadership transition. We will keep you informed of all changes moving forward!
Sehgal, Parul. “The Case Against the Trauma Plot.” The New Yorker, 27 Dec. 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/03/the-case-against-the-trauma-plot.
Self, Will. “A Posthumous Shock: How Everything Became Trauma.” Harper’s Magazine, vol. 343, no. 2059, Dec. 2021, pp. 23-34. ProQuest, http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/magazines/posthumous-shock-how-everything-became-trauma/docview/2623610308/se-2.
Suggested optional reading: Rowland, Katherine. “‘They’re selling everything as trauma’: How Our Emotional Pain Became a Product.” The Guardian, 14 Dec. 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/14/trauma-mental-health.
Some key passages:
Will Self, “A Posthumous Shock”:
“I shall be advancing the heretical notion that trauma as we now understand it is not a timeless phenomenon that has affected people in different cultures and at different times in much the same way, but is to a hitherto unacknowledged extent a function of modernity in all its shocking suddenness. Furthermore, I will argue that trauma is so widespread precisely because of the ubiquity of traumatogenic technologies in our societies: those of specularity and acceleration, which render us simultaneously unreflective and frenetic. On this analysis, the symptoms deemed evidence of PTSD are in fact only an extreme version of a distinctively modern consciousness” (Self 2).
“…part of what gives modern trauma theory its appeal is precisely its covert importation of Judeo-Christian redemptive eschatology: a grand narrative of human moral progress in which suffering is an essential motivation for all the principal actors. For literary theorists, psychic trauma is an exclusive sort of stigmata, a wound at once invisible and sacred, the bearers of which become sanctified and thereby able to convey the singular Truth that shines through the miasma of contemporary moral relativism: that of their own suffering. This suffering is elicited by the intercession of qualified (or ordained) critics and psychotherapists, who join in this communion of pain and distress, and share it with the laity via books and monographs” (Self 2).
“…it’s the fidelity of recollection that becomes the most important issue for those struggling to establish an etiology of psychological trauma. There was ‘the shake,’ and there was the memory of what provoked it: a cause that, since it was too extreme to be assimilated at the time, becomes a strange sort of effect by recurring in the victim’s psyche, often in the form of day- or nightmares” (Self 3).
“But however the traumatic event is visited on the individual, the question remains: Are the symptoms that have come to be identified as evidence of trauma peculiar to the modern era? We would expect literary critics who insist otherwise to produce evidence from literary sources—either diaristic or fictive accounts of those characteristic flashbacks to events that cannot be narrated in a conventional way. Yet this is seldom the way they go about things” (Self 5).
“But it may be that such validation is therapeutically necessary. At least one explanation for the widespread suffering from what was first dubbed ‘shell shock’ (and then placed under the causational catchall ‘war neuroses’) was that the mass conscript armies of World War I returned to take up social roles that afforded no valorization of their disturbing experiences—no Ajaxes, they. In earlier eras, career warriors were not only permitted to describe their bloody feats and failures but were part of a wider culture that effectively encouraged them to do so, or sustained others to do so using the appropriate poetic forms. Moreover, conscripts returning from the war had to reassume civilian identities, thus introducing a troubling doubling of their own psyches: such extraordinary memories were quite simply unassimilable by their quotidian minds” (Self 7).
“That the traumas experienced by Vietnam veterans were as much a function of acts they had perpetrated as they were of those inflicted upon them in part explains why contemporary trauma theorists’ conceptions of the malady, and their attendant therapies, collapse this fundamental ethical distinction” (Self 7).
“Caruth’s determination to cleave simultaneously to the idea both that the traumatic memory is the only historic fact the individual possesses and that this facticity remains incapable of adequate representation is paradoxical bordering on the perverse. By the same analysis, what deindividuates us in relation to the historical eras we inhabit is precisely this: the shocking and therefore inassimilable nature of the traumatogenic events to which we’ve been subjected” (Self 8).
“The paradox is that Caruth and the other trauma theorists who follow in her vein wish to assert trauma’s significance as timeless, all while forging an ideology clearly linked to the most salient mass traumas of the twentieth century. Or at least to one in particular: the Holocaust. In fact, one of the most significant trauma theorists, the Israeli-American psychiatrist Dori Laub, was himself a Holocaust survivor, which undoubtedly gives his theorizing moral traction—but that’s no reason to accord his epistemological claims any greater status than those of anyone else” (Self 8).
“Without being able to say anything definitive about literature, what, pray, is the point of literary critics? Concomitantly, if such luminaries lay claim to the artistic freedom allotted to poets and novelists, then why are their texts all too often devoid of any aesthetic sense at all, while being replete with jargon both ugly and incomprehensible? Heading in the opposite direction, the breaking down of barriers altogether between discourses and the view of literature as possessing the epistemic gravity of philosophy—or science for that matter—also seem to have produced still more critical texts that exhibit the worst stylistic failings of both” (Self 8-9).
“No longer priestesses and priests in the cult of the Western Logos, no longer implicit defenders of the status quo ante, literary critics become warriors for synchronic justice conceived as catharsis. All must be resolved now by collective abreaction, whereby literary critics will be the handmaidens of a sort of universal truth-and-reconciliation event: cathartic Rapture” (Self 9).
“But of course, anxieties about the extent to which the symptoms of trauma—the flashbacks, daymares, nightmares, shakes, and shivers—have been implanted in distressed minds by well-meaning but wrongheaded doctors can never be entirely repressed. The problem being that for the traumatized there is no external, open wound—only an internal, psychic one” (Self 10).
“This is, I think, the context within which we should view trauma theory. The theorists feel great crimes have been committed but—by reason of the instability of language, and the partiality of those who speak it—there can be no possibility of an indictment. Unless, that is, there is a veridical image imprinted in the victims’ mind/brain, one which can be extracted using a method that depends simultaneously on the necessity of speech and the impossibility of its communicating the truth. The great anxiety about the forgetting of trauma is that we will be doomed to repeat it. Just as we might conceive of the symptoms associated with PTSD as the somatic equivalent of an earworm: an attempt to ‘play the experience through’ to the effective end we were denied in the first instance precisely because of our shock” (Self 10).
“To decouple the experience of the great twentieth-century traumas from the train of history is, paradoxically, to watch it decelerate into a siding and halt. Only the universalization of such traumas and their incorporation into a grand narrative of human moral progress will deliver ‘us’ (itself a dubious piece of inclusion, humans being quite as various as they are) from the suspicion that things are getting worse. Getting worse, specifically, through those technologies of acceleration and specularity that I believe have massively increased the production of trauma” (Self 11).
Modern specular technologies: “The insistence that technologies of this sort are value-neutral is shown up for the speciousness it is once the cost of their production becomes clear. That we live in affluent societies, in bubbles of safety and comfort underwritten by the labor of machines and people banished from our purview, is a realization everywhere repressed: these are the steely wheels slicing away beneath the most vulnerable portions of our bodies, as we swipe left and the train of progress chunters on into the night. The light of reason shines the way” (Self 12).
“This alone: the formal structural relation between the flashback and the radical analepsis of trauma should surely have alerted us before now to the intrinsically traumatogenic character of the modern era, with its ever more graphic and hyperreal stagings of human disembodiment” (Self 12).
Parul Sehgal, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot”:
Debates around the trauma plot: “Modern life is inherently traumatic. No, we’re just better at spotting it, having become more attentive to human suffering in all its gradations. Unless we’re worse at it—more prone to perceive everything as injury. In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status—our red badge of courage? The question itself might offend: perhaps it’s grotesque to argue about the symbolic value attributed to suffering when so little restitution or remedy is available” (Sehgal 3).
“The claim that trauma’s imprint is a timeless feature of our species, that it etches itself on the human brain in a distinct way, ignores how trauma has been evolving since the days of railway spine; traumatic flashbacks were reported only after the invention of film. Are the words that come to our lips when we speak of our suffering ever purely our own?” (Sehgal 4).
“Trauma trumps all other identities, evacuates personality, remakes it in its own image. The story is built on the care and service that Jude elicits from a circle of supporters who fight to protect him from his self-destructive ways; truly, there are newborns envious of the devotion he inspires. The loyalty can be mystifying for the reader, who is conscripted to join in, as a witness to Jude’s unending mortifications. Can we so easily invest in this walking chalk outline, this vivified DSM entry? With the trauma plot, the logic goes: Evoke the wound and we will believe that a body, a person, has borne it” (Sehgal 5).
“Trauma has become synonymous with backstory, but the tyranny of backstory is itself a relatively recent phenomenon—one that, like any successful convention, has a way of skirting our notice” (Sehgal 5).
“Certainly the filmmakers of classical Hollywood cinema were quite able to bring characters to life without portentous flashbacks to formative torments. In contrast, characters are now created in order to be dispatched into the past, to truffle for trauma” (Sehgal 6).
“Stories rebel against the constriction of the trauma plot with skepticism, comedy, critique, fantasy, and a prickly awareness of the genre and audience expectations” (Sehgal 8).
“It often yields a story that can be easily diagrammed, a self that can be easily diagnosed. But in deft hands the trauma plot is taken only as a beginning—with a middle and an end to be sought elsewhere. With a wider aperture, we move out of the therapeutic register and into a generational, social, and political one. It becomes a portal into history and into a common language” (Sehgal 9).
“The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority. The solace of its simplicity comes at no little cost. It disregards what we know and asks that we forget it, too—forget about the pleasures of not knowing, about the unscripted dimensions of suffering, about the odd angularities of personality, and, above all, about the allure and necessity of a well-placed sea urchin” (Sehgal 10).
Katherine Rowland, “‘They’re selling everything as trauma’”:
“Today, an entire industry has spawned around the idea that everything is trauma. Once understood as the psyche’s confrontation with genuine catastrophe, trauma is now treated as a personal possession: something to be owned, narrated and curated by the individual. This drift marks the entrance point to a broader cultural shift: the commodification of pain” (Rowland 2).
“Trauma, which once invoked a shattering incident, is now found in the unavoidable abrasions of ordinary life. It is implicated in procrastination, occupational malaise, and listless attachments. It is the reason we are ‘bad at relationships’; it is why we nap too much; it is the antecedent to our compulsive binging of Friends. As a result, trauma has been rendered meaningless. Or as psychiatrist Arash Javanbakht told me: ‘When everything is trauma, nothing is’” (Rowland 2).
“The majority of Americans have experienced an event that falls within psychiatry’s parameters of trauma, said Javanbakht, who directs the Stress, Trauma and Anxiety Research Clinic at Wayne State University school of medicine. ‘We’re talking about assault, robbery, rape, shootings, war exposures, serious motor vehicle accidents, life threatening illnesses.’ And yet, this widespread exposure does not necessarily translate into lasting debility” (Rowland 5).
“Trauma has become a form of cultural currency that risks pathologizing every day experience and confers an identity that is ‘virtuous but impotent’, writes psychologist Nicholas Haslam of the University of Melbourne. Trauma is, by definition, something external – a rupture that tears through what we imagine to be an otherwise continuous life. Because of that, Haslam told me, it can serve a psychological function by giving meaning to feelings of distress, stuckness and the confusion we all feel in life” (Rowland 6).
“There is a paradox influencers and their followers rarely foresee: the tighter one clings to the wound, the narrower life becomes. Indeed, research suggests that labeling distress as a mental health problem gives rise to a genuine increase in symptoms. The label itself becomes destructive” (Rowland 7).
“Another unintended consequence: as trauma saturates our culture, those most harmed are eclipsed by those who are most prolific. Online performances of distress, Javanbakht argues, risk trivializing the suffering of people who have endured truly debilitating harm” (Rowland 7).
“The privileged get platformed and access to therapeutic resources, while systemic suffering is shunted further into the margins” (Rowland 8).
“As a moral category, it [trauma] determines who deserves both resources and compassion. To be recognized as traumatized is to claim a ticket to legitimacy” (Rowland 8).
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Note: The featured image for this post is the title image from Will Self’s article in Harper’s Magazine. Illustration by Patrik Svensson.