Speaking In and Speaking Out: Posttraumatic Poetry and Autography

Abstract

Jensen analyses the complex strategies used to communicate posttraumatic autobiographical experience through the limiting frames of autography and poetry. Outlining the latest neuroscientific understandings of the relations between mental illness and the creative drive, Jensen demonstrates how both poetry and autography have arisen alongside traumatic historical contexts: while poetry traditionally communicated the horrors of war and imprisonment, autography has been used to tell stories of genocide, rape, incest, anorexia, and pedophilia. Jensen argues that often in posttraumatic autobiographical works in these strict forms a remembered, intrusive scene of violent incursion upon the mind and body is “spoken out” verbally or visually in a manner similar to ekphrástic poetic renderings of a painting or sculpture. Drawing attention to this form of ekphrásis as the business of posttraumatic poetry and autography, Jensen concludes that in both forms, metaphor is used to reread powerful images and provide a rhetorical bridge between affective realms.