مشخصات پژوهش

Trauma theory in the Humanities emerged in the United States in the early 1990s, seeking to elaborate on the cultural and ethical implications of trauma, then, “the field of trauma studies in literary criticism gained significant attention in 1996 with the publication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History” (Balaev 4). According to Caruth, ‘trauma’ in the broadest definition is “describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive” (Caruth 11). Caruth puts more effort into understanding its surprising impact than on redefining trauma, so as to “examine how trauma unsettles and forces us to rethink our notion of experience, and of communication in therapy, in the classroom, and in literature, as well as in psychoanalytic theory” (Caruth 4). Therefore, Caruth combined essays and interviews by literary theorists, filmmakers, sociologists, psychiatrists and so on in order to emphasise the trans-disciplinary nature of trauma theory. The origin and definition of trauma in this thesis is important because Virginia Woolf experienced various traumas during her life. Virginia Woolf is to this day considered one of the leading writers of the modernist movement. She was one of those who brought new ways of writing to the surface, and, with each piece of writing, she displayed a profound ability to perceive the world around her in much detail and describe it from various changing perspectives. At the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism was the most widespread movement concerning culture and literature. “One of the main values that literary modernism challenged was the liberal rationalism of the previous centuries.”(Vincent 17) It was breaking free from the traditional ways, and just as technology was blooming and cities were filled with industry, writers were finding new ways to work with literature. The authors’ focus on the indi