Word.ws English Dictionary

traumacore

traumacore noun: a repressed memory of an event that when triggered becomes the primary reason for feeling traumatized.

Noun

traumacore (plural not attested)

  1. (countable, no plural) A repressed memory of an event that when triggered becomes the primary reason for feeling traumatized.
    • In an immobilization taken up in Kafka's story by the literal fixation of the victim to the bed, the traumacore fixates the victim of trauma to a specific temporal slot in its development (the traumatime and the traumasite), to which it returns, against its conscious will, freezing again and again...1999, Pynchon Notes - Issues 42-43, page 246
    • According to Berressem, the ultimate 'traumacore' in Pynchon's poetics is the fall into language, subjectivity and culture, a fall that entails the realization of death, not face to face but rather in the face of the letter.2001, American Studies in Scandinavia - Volumes 33-34, page 134
  2. (no plural, uncountable, aesthetic) A genre of Internet art where cutesy, childish visuals or motifs are juxtaposed with the anguish of trauma and abuse, creating a distorted, unsettling, and psychologically heavy atmosphere.

Examples of traumacore in a sentence

  • The traumacore functions, therefore, as an always already excluded, crossed out origin, such as the event of my own birth.2003, Wolfram Mauser, Joachim Pfeiffer, Trauer, page 91:
  • While the infinitely "small" time of the clinamen designates for Lacan the time of the "traumacore," it designates for Lucretius the birth of complexity.2005, Niran Abbas, Mapping Michel Serres, page 63:

Origin of traumacore

From trauma + core.

Questions about traumacore

What does traumacore mean?
Traumacore means a repressed memory of an event that when triggered becomes the primary reason for feeling traumatized.
How do you use traumacore in a sentence?
The traumacore functions, therefore, as an always already excluded, crossed out origin, such as the event of my own birth.
What part of speech is traumacore?
Traumacore is a noun.

Words near traumacore in the dictionary

  1. traumabond
  2. traumabonded
  3. traumabonding
  4. traumabondings
  5. traumabonds
  6. traumacore
  7. traumagenic
  8. traumaless
  9. traumas
  10. traumascape
  11. traumascapes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: traumacore (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “traumacore.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/traumacore. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.