I think I need a smallish canvas to work out my ideas for this next project. For years, I've had this interest in the intersection of music and trauma. You can find my earliest musings on the topic here, here, and here. I had the good fortune to teach this class a few times, and it changed shape (as classes often do). It got to a point where I put my thoughts on the subject together into a book proposal. A Major Press was very interested in it: I got one "yes," one "revise and resubmit," one "no" (to this day, I don't think that person read the proposal--it was a "this isn't the book I would've written" kind of response, and rather condescending), and one "regrettably, no, but here are lots of important ways to fix it."
I very much appreciated the thoughtful comments of the last reviewer. I put the project aside (and wasn't slated to teach the course for a few years), and got distracted with other projects. Now I'm back at it, and trying to think about what this revised project looks like. The old project was organized according to specific crises. The book's table of contents looked something like this:
I very much appreciated the thoughtful comments of the last reviewer. I put the project aside (and wasn't slated to teach the course for a few years), and got distracted with other projects. Now I'm back at it, and trying to think about what this revised project looks like. The old project was organized according to specific crises. The book's table of contents looked something like this:
- Defining trauma and crisis
- How music can help
- 9/11
- AIDS
- George Rochberg
- Hurricane Katrina
- Hip hop
I thought that I want to organize it in terms of traumatic symptoms. There still needs to be some kind of overview. The specific crises will still loom large throughout (I've spent a lot of time studying them), but I don't want them to be limiting. One of the interesting things about this project (as you may have inferred from the table of contents) is the idea's ability to span different styles and genres.
I've wrestled with what the new organization will look like, considering topics like conceptual metaphors, repetition, root shock, historical/intergenerational trauma, etc. I've been reading Freud, Lacan, Caruth, and other trauma theorists along with books on Rochberg, Metallica, etc. (Oddly enough, the original text relied quite heavily on the work of Abraham Maslow, which made a lot of sense at the time for some reason, but makes not very much sense now. I do, however, believe that his work is due for reappraisal because he has a lot of interesting ideas that I think advances in both cognitive neuroscience and cultural studies could help bear out).
I think, though, that narrative is the thread that ties all of these things together in the way that I want to tie them together. Trauma is a rupture in the narrative. It's important to look at the kinds of stories we tell--on the large and small scales, and everywhere in between--the ways in which they intersect, overlap, and combine. And I think those are the ideas that I want to--need to--work out here.
Thanks for reading; stay tuned; comments always welcome!