Literature at the Dawn of Trauma Consciousness

Adam Wolfsdorf

We are living are living in the age of the trigger warning— educational cultures that threaten English teachers’ ability to present psychologically upsetting literature to students who may lack the necessary resilience to tolerate highly charged literary encounters with complex issues, such as rape, violence, racism, or political strife. And yet literature is filled with conflict— artistic representations of the precise traumas that certain members of our student populations may not be able to tolerate. In order to safeguard trauma survivors from potential reactivation of traumatic stress, a handful of educational institutions promote the use of trigger warnings. But are trigger warnings effective, and, if they are, what do they teach English teachers about what happens to individuals who have endured trauma and are therefore susceptible to being triggered? The purpose of this...