A Study On The Writing Of Deafness Trauma In Deaf Sentence

The dual roles of novelist and critic makes David Lodge’s creation strong selfconscious and realistic. His own life experiences and his constant attention on social events have great influence on his writing themes. The best representative of the influence of traumatic experiences on his creation is Deaf Sentence(2008), which presents not only the author’s traumatic experience of being deaf, but also the British people’s spiritual state after London 7·7 terrorist attack. However, the literature reviews on David Lodge’s novels at home and abroad indicate that the scholars pay attention to the themes of the aging,spiritual crisis and the death, scholars rarely touched upon the theme of deafness and the dimension of trauma in this work. Even though some scholars touched upon it, their studies discuss deafness as a kind of disability and neglect the traumatic influences of cultural construction on the protagonist’s psychology. Based on this research status, taking Judith Herman’s theory of psychological trauma and Jeffrey C. Alexander’s cultural trauma as theoretical foundation, this thesis explores the psychological and cultural representation of deafness trauma in both individual and collective level as well as the strategies to work through the deafness trauma in Deaf Sentence to revel David Lodge’s consciousness on deafness and the healing of trauma.Specifically, departing from the representation of deafness as individual trauma, this thesis firstly explores the meaning construction of deafness. On the personal level,psychological representation of the protagonist’s post-lingual deafness is analyzed from three dimensions of chronic trauma, salient trauma and unclaimed trauma. On the collective level, the representation of deafness as cultural trauma in Deaf Sentence involving three aspects: the traumatic ingredients in social-cultural context, rhetorical strategies of trauma carrier groups and the relationship between the victims and audience.Subsequently this thesis concentrates on the strategies to work through deafness trauma to construct a more open and tolerate discourse of deafness by analyzing the protagonist’sthree ways to works through the trauma of deafness: mourning traumatic loss, developing new relationships, and reconstructing traumatic memory by writing. The research shows that David Lodge has double deafness consciousness: On one hand, he conceives deafness not as kind of disability but a state which everyone may experience in his life and advocates the commonality of experience of deafness. He casts his doubt about the dominant Deaf discourse and suggests attending post-lingual deaf community and writing contribute to the hybrid discourses of deafness. On the other hand, deafness is a symptom of trauma inherent in modernity.The reflection on dominant anti-terrorism in post-9·11time helps people realize the commonality of human life to overcome the symbolized deafness in cultures.In summary, the thesis explores the wring trauma of deafness in Deaf Sentence so as to appropriately comprehend David Lodge’s consciousness on deafness and the healing of trauma implied in this novel. It is expected to broaden and deepen the study of Deaf Sentence and offer a new perspective to study David Lodge’s works and creative thoughts.Meanwhile, through adopting psychological trauma and cultural trauma to interpret the writing of deafness, the thesis is expected to make certain contribution to the application of the trauma theory in the literature study.