Because traumatic events are unbearable in their horror and intensity, they often exist as memories that are not immediately recognisable 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. This work offers an analysis of what literature and the new approaches of a variety of clinical and theoretical disciplines bring to the understanding of traumatic experience. The combination of essays and interviews is intended to 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.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"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
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Für Beruf und Forschung
Maße
Höhe: 229 mm
Breite: 152 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-8018-5009-7 (9780801850097)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Cathy Caruth is associate professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of 'Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions', also available from Johns Hopkins.
Herausgeber*in
Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters English and Comparative LiteratureCornell University
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
