Reviews
Of immense significance to scholars in multiple disciplines, including history, literature and literary theory, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, this book will set the tone for future discussion... Essential.
Caruth, then, presents a "new kind" of history: a history that is itself under erasure and that calls for an urgent reimagining of the way we think of—and write about—the past.
It is rewarding and immensely exciting to follow the twists and turns of Caruth’s brilliant and endlessly surprising arguments.
In these captivating analyses, Cathy Caruth again breaks new ground for literary and trauma studies. Literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical texts from Balzac via Freud and Arendt to Dorfman and Derrida are illuminated by Caruth's brilliant and subtle readings to reveal their stunning historical and political relevance for our twenty-first-century world in which war veterans and torture victims still return from the dead and in which pervasive deliberate deception in politics acquires the weight of actions that violently erase memory in creating new 'events.' Caruth's analyses call for nothing less than a 'rethinking of the very nature of history around the possibility of its erasure'—a most urgent appeal in our days.
Book Details
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part One: Literature and the Life Drive
1. Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
2. The Claims of the Dead: History, Haunted
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part One: Literature and the Life Drive
1. Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
2. The Claims of the Dead: History, Haunted Property, and the Law
Honoré de Balzac, Colonel Chabert
Part Two: After the End
3. Lying and History
Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics" and "Lying in Politics"
4. Disappearing History: Scenes of Trauma in the Theater of Human Rights
Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden
5. Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of History
Wilhelm Jensen, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida
Afterword
Notes
Index