Writing History, Writing Trauma (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society) - Softcover

Lacapra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801864968 ISBN 13: 9780801864964

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Trauma and its often symptomatic aftermath pose acute problems for historical representation and understanding. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra provides a broad-ranging, critical inquiry into the problem of trauma, notably with respect to major historical events. In a series of interlocking essays, he explores theoretical and literary-critical attempts to come to terms with trauma as well as the crucial role post-traumatic testimonies—particularly Holocaust testimonies—have assumed in recent thought and writing. In doing so, he adapts psychoanalytic concepts to historical analysis and employs sociocultural and political critique to elucidate trauma and its after effects in culture and in people.

In the first chapter LaCapra addresses trauma from the perspective of history as a discipline. He then lays a theoretical groundwork for the book as a whole, exploring the concept of historical specificity and insisting on the difference between transhistorical and historical trauma. Subsequent chapters consider how Holocaust testimonies raise the problem of the role of affect and empathy in historical understanding, and respond to the debates surrounding Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. The book's concluding essay, "Writing (About) Trauma," examines the various ways that the voice of trauma emerges in written and oral accounts of historical events. Theoretically ambitious and historically informed, Writing History, Writing Trauma is an important contribution from one of today's foremost experts on trauma.

About this title

Product Description

Writing History, Writing Trauma In this study, Dominick LaCapra offers a broad-ranging, critical enquiry into the problem of trauma, notably with respect to major historical events. In a series of interlocking essays, he explores theoretical and literary-critical attempts to come to terms with trauma. Full description

Review

LaCapra's analysis of trauma is folded into an ambitious and compelling reflection on the possibilities for a genuinely cross-disciplinary theoretical dialogue on history... Important reading not only to trauma theorists and their critics, but to historians and literary critics of all persuasions invested in rethinking the relationship between trauma, history and ethics.

(Debarati Sanyal SubStance)

Intellectually complex yet lucid.

(Erik Weisengruber Literary Research)

Thoughtful and compelling... LaCapra's discussions of historiography, philosophy, and psychoanalysis are extraordinarily lucid, and this book is a brilliant example of some of the capabilities of contemporary trauma theory in analyzing representations of trauma.

(Tikkun)

The strength of LaCapra's text lies in its urgency, in the clarity of its commitment to historiographic adequacy and the constructive potential of a psychoanalytic mode of interpretation, and in its appeal to a sense of civic responsibility.

(Nina Goss and Gary Handwerk Criticism)

Until now trauma studies lacked the kind of discerning metacommentary that would adjudicate among its emergent logics, truth claims, intellectual strategies, objects of analysis, and scholarly positions. That dream of totalization, however, is precisely what LaCapra casts doubt upon in his important new book.

(Walter Kalaidjian Modernism/Modernity)

LaCapra's insightful and compassionate Writing History, Writing Trauma concerns the interpretation of historical traumas such as the Holocaust and the traumas' enduring effects. LaCapra both uses and transcends contemporary critical theory in assessing the influence of trauma on present-day historical writing.

(Richard L. Rubenstein Holocaust and Genocide Studies)

One could not wish for a more judicious, lucid, and compassionate guide through the complexities of post-traumatic writing than LaCapra. No one has done more to sustain the vitality and humanity of critical thinking in the face of those historical events—above all the Shoah—which seem to defy comprehension. These essays will frame the debates on the 'writing of trauma' for years to come. LaCapra lays out, with the care, precision, and compassion we have come to expect from him, the terms and distinctions by which we can begin to think through the complexities of post-traumatic writing. These essays provide absolutely crucial points of orientation in the haunted spaces of post-Holocaust culture, thought, and representation.

(Eric Santner, University of Chicago)

In these typically cogent essays, LaCapra once again works to determine subtle and necessary distinctions between history and trauma, absence and loss, and theory and practice while never reducing them to binaries. Few other historians have so forcefully appealed to the power of empathy in addressing historical trauma, and none have done so much to place history and critical theory into a mutually enriching and necessary dialogue.

(Carolyn Dean, Brown University)

These are essays on the cutting edge, consistent in theme and perspective, carefully argued, sometimes personal, always clear. Writing History, Writing Trauma offers a critique of unalloyed 'objectivism,' combined with a lively attempt to conceptualize how history writing should deal with the 'post-traumatic'—a category that is merging more and more with 'post-modernism,' 'post-structuralism,' and 'post-Holocaust.'.

(Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University)

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0801864968
• ISBN 13: 9780801864964
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208