Trauma: Explorations in Memory

Front Cover
Cathy Caruth
JHU Press, 1995 - Literary Criticism - 277 pages

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

 

Contents

Introduction
3
Education and Crisis or the Vicissitudes of Teaching
13
The Process and the Struggle
61
A ThirtyYear FollowUp
76
One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma
100
Frontier Concepts Jewishness and Interpretation
113
An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton
128
CATHY CARUTH
151
The Flexibility of Memory
158
Notes on Trauma and Community
183
An Evening with Claude Lanzmann
200
Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima
221
Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter
236
A Conversation
256
Contributors
273
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About the author (1995)

Cathy Caruth is a leading figure in psychoanalytically informed literary theory and humanistic approaches to trauma. She is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University, with appointments in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. Her books include Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud; Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History; and Trauma: Explorations in Memory, all published by Johns Hopkins.