Trauma: Explorations in Memory - Hardcover

Caruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801850096 ISBN 13: 9780801850097

Publisher: John Hopkins University Press, 1995

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0801850096
• ISBN 13: 9780801850097
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288