whereas trauma conception has been followed by means of modern literary and cultural stories as a moral strategy to examine depictions of discomfort, there's a danger that its current use can cause extra damage than sturdy. through emphasizing inaccessible histories, unspeakable affliction, and subconscious witnessing, trauma conception could lead on readers to say others’ soreness via empathic id.
In With the Witnesses, Dale Tracy argues that poetry bargains an alternate method of have interaction with not just ache in artwork yet anguish more often than not. reading the recommendations of witness poetry, Tracy interrogates and reformulates the dominant versions of trauma reviews during which readers take over the witnessing place by way of choosing with the speaker as a witness, therefore changing into witnesses themselves. If the aim of interpreting such poetry is to give a contribution new witnesses to a sequence, what's the particular position of a reader? How does this function vary from the speaker of a poem’s function? Tracy proposes that metonymy – a good judgment of nearness instead of likeness – is compassion’s formal manifestation. examining poetry that emphasizes the contiguity of metonymy over the substitution of metaphor, she attends to the positions into which witnessing audio system invite readers. Poems that reply to different nationwide and transnational contexts of atrocity, clash, and marginalization advisor With the Witnesses towards a compassionate reaction to agony that includes feeling with – now not as – one other.
Following each one poem as a different concept of compassion, With the Witnesses demonstrates that poems carry affliction signed as paintings, now not claimable lines of suffering.