Trauma: Explorations in Memory / Edition 1

by Cathy Caruth

Overview

Because traumatic events are unbearable in their horror and intensity, they often exist as memories that are not immediately recognizable as truth. Such experiences are best understood not only through the straightforward acquisition of facts but through a process of discovering where and why conscious understanding and memory fail. Literature, according to Cathy Caruth and others, opens a window on traumatic experience because it teaches readers to listen to what can be told only in indirect and surprising ways. Sociology, film, and political activism can also provide new ways of thinking about and responding to the experience of trauma.

In Trauma and Memory, a distinguished group of analysts and critics offer a compelling look at what literature and the new approaches of a variety of clinical and theoretical disciplines bring to the understanding of traumatic experience. Combining two highly-acclaimed special issues of American Imago edited by Caruth, this interdisciplinary collection of essays and interviews will be of interest to analysts and critics concerned with the notion of trauma and the problem of interpretation and, more generally, to those interested in current discussions of subjects such as child abuse, AIDS, and the effects of historical atrocities such as the Holocaust.

Contributions by: Georges Bataille, Harold Bloom, Laura Brown, Cathy Caruth, Kai Erikson, Shoshana Felman, Henry Krystal, Claude Lanzmann, Dori Laub, Kevin Newmark, Onno van der Hart, and Bessel van der Kolk. Interviews with: Robert Jay Lifton, Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, and Laura Pinsky

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801850073
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	06/01/1995
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Cathy Caruth is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University. She is the author of Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Literature in the Ashes of History, Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience, and Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions, also available from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Table of Contents

Preface
Part I: Trauma and Experience
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching
Chapter 3. Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle
Chapter 4. Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow-Up
Chapter 5. Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma
Chapter 6. Freud: Frontier Concepts, Jewishness, and Interpretation
Chapter 7. An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton
Part II: Recapturing the Past
Chapter 8. Introduction
Chapter 9. The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma
Chapter 10. Notes on Trauma and Community
Chapter 11. The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening With Claude Lanzmann
Chapter 12. Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima
Chapter 13. Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter
Chapter 14. "The AIDS Crisis is Not Over": A Conversation with Gregg Bordowitz, Douglass Crimp, and Laura Pinsky
Contributors

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

An unusually informative, as well as sensitive, series of essays with important ramifications for interdisciplinary theory and both social and literary thought. Caruth and her contributors work at the very intersection of contemporary life and scholarship.
—Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University

These essays offer fresh approaches on the subject of trauma from both a psychoanalytic and contemporary theoretical point of view. The combination of theoretical articles about trauma with interviews about its ongoing effects is a particular strength—and a particularly appropriate approach when the topic itself is silence or testimony about trauma. The book will be of great interest to those in the psychoanalytic community interested in this kind of interdisciplinary work.
—Alan Bass, Ph.D., Psychoanalyst

Geoffrey Hartman

An unusually informative, as well as sensitive, series of essays with important ramifications for interdisciplinary theory and both social and literary thought. Caruth and her contributors work at the very intersection of contemporary life and scholarship.

Alan Bass

These essays offer fresh approaches on the subject of trauma from both a psychoanalytic and contemporary theoretical point of view. The combination of theoretical articles about trauma with interviews about its ongoing effects is a particular strength—and a particularly appropriate approach when the topic itself is silence or testimony about trauma. The book will be of great interest to those in the psychoanalytic community interested in this kind of interdisciplinary work.

Editorial Reviews

The most thought-provoking book I have read this year is probably Cathy Caruth's anthology Trauma: Explorations in Memory. It's a 1995 collection of essays by a range of authors from the fields of psychoanalysis and literary and cultural criticism, including the film-maker Claude Lanzmann (Shoah). The frequently mechanical and lifeless nature of traumatised discourse, the question of how you listen and communicate, and the possible moral obligation to resist understanding the perpetrators are some of the themes, but there are others, too, as relevant today as they were then.
--Sigrid Rausing, New Statesman

From the Publisher

In essays that demonstrate the ways in which a variety of disciplines can contribute to understanding trauma, contributors discuss aspects in trauma research, touching on topics such as trauma and aging, feminist perspectives, traumatic poetry, and accounts by residents of Hiroshima. Versions of the essays in this volume were originally published in 1991 in two issues of American Imago, under the title "Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma." No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

The most thought-provoking book I have read this year is probably Cathy Caruth's anthology Trauma: Explorations in Memory. It's a 1995 collection of essays by a range of authors from the fields of psychoanalysis and literary and cultural criticism, including the film-maker Claude Lanzmann (Shoah). The frequently mechanical and lifeless nature of traumatised discourse, the question of how you listen and communicate, and the possible moral obligation to resist understanding the perpetrators are some of the themes, but there are others, too, as relevant today as they were then.

New Statesman - Sigrid Rausing