'Because Like -- And so I Don't -- So I Think It's Maybe, I Don't Know': Performing Traumatic Effects While Reading Lynda Barry's 'The Freddie Stories'

SANE Journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education. Available from: Digital Commons @ University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Web site: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/

Y

39

Literary Devices; Trauma; Reading Processes; Reading Comprehension; Undergraduate Students; Teacher Education; Psychological Patterns; Books; Visual Aids; Reader Response; Foreign Countries

2153-2613

As a picture of childhood composed from the point of view of a young boy named Freddie, who suffers the effects of repeated and ongoing trauma, the experience of reading "The Freddie Stories" presents a number of interpretive challenges: its main character is often split and in various states of disassociation, the difference between dreaming and waking life is not always obvious, multiple monsters appear in different and changeable forms, and as Freddie experiences repeated difficulties with language and cognitive function, his traumatic past enfolds upon the time in which the story is set. In this paper, we analyze how undergraduate readers in teacher education engage with Barry's text, and how their experience of reading about trauma effectively mirrors the psychological effects of Freddie's suffering: getting lost in the text, being at a loss for words, reading in a state of enfolded temporality. Given how trauma disarticulates the self, this paper investigates how Barry's text disarticulates the adult's reading experience.

As Provided

2020

EJ1257642