Trauma Plot News Today

Two recent dramas that pivot on the fraught convergence of consent, power, and desire have turned these tropes on their heads by inverting the gender of the potentially abusive adults. Todd Field’s Tár (2022) and Todd Haynes’s May December (2023) both center on complex adult female characters who fall for young paramours. In Tár, Cate Blanchett plays a world-renowned composer-conductor whose affairs with younger female musicians end up undermining her career. In May December, Julianne Moor...

May 2018 was a pivotal moment for people we might now call “anti-woke” thinkers. When Bari Weiss put together a feature on “the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” writers and academics who churned out books and blog posts on political correctness suddenly acquired the sheen of glamour that comes from having a forbidden or dissident point of view. The piece, which profiled “a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities&#...

Lexi Freiman’s novel about a canceled writer skewers pieties left and right.

If I were asked to trace the decline of the American psyche, I suppose I would go to a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades, when writers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe noticed the emergence of what came to be known as the therapeutic culture.

How an epidemic of immaturity swept our land.

Depiction of such problematic forms of ‘romance’ and relationships surely distort the judgement of readers regarding love and romance.

Why aren’t happy experiences the ones we want to analyze as literary critics? Why do we so often gravitate toward sad or traumatic stories in English literature courses?

Peter Weiss's 1960 novella boasts an imagistic sequence of boardinghouse vignettes that are sometimes humorous, sometimes horrifying.

It's been criticized for being used as a "shortcut," but it can actually offer something essential to its audience.

Breaking news stories focus on the event, but what about the long-term trauma experienced by those who survived? What about the fallout?