Chapter 8 - Trauma Studies

Summary

In “Trauma Studies: Hemingway’s Neurological and Corporeal Injuries,” Sarah Anderson Wood examines the way recent developments in trauma studies and increased awareness of mental health issues have enhanced and sometimes reframed Hemingway scholarship about his mental and physical health over the course of his life, but particularly in regard to the author’s rapid decline in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Trauma studies, Wood contends, has informed advances in medical science, in psychiatry, in the historicity of treatment and therapy, and simply in the artistic representation of pain, all of which have impacted scholars’ understandings of Hemingway’s relationship to suffering. Wood also points to studies that are exploring the impact these conditions may have had on his later writing and to the potential of the burgeoning field of epigenetics, which looks at gene expression and not simply genetic coding. She pays particular attention to Andrew Farah’s Hemingway’s Brain and Linda Wagner-Martin’s Hemingway’s Wars: Public and Private Battles (both 2017).