ABSTRACT
If trauma truly is a paradigm in the humanities, this is owed to the notion of unspeakability. The three quotes above testify to this sense of the speechlessness of terror, engendering a negative representability which signies trauma by negating the possibility of referring to an experience beyond the scope of cognitive understanding and emotional livability. Trauma, thus, renders the mind apart as the forcefulness of shock shatters memory’s narrative structures but persists in the life of body and affect. That trauma literature is therefore a case of, as Rapaport suggests, the “unspeakability of history addressed by the unspeakability of art” (2002, 234), is nevertheless a premise more complex and less inevitable than might initially appear.
