Trauma and Visuality in Modernity

by Lisa Saltzman (Editor)

This groundbreaking collection is among the first in the field of art history to explore the relation between the traumatic and the visual field in the modern period. Ranging across media and spanning from the origins of modernity to the present, the essays gathered here pursue trauma as a structuring yet elusive subject of representation. Examining the most revelatory instances of encounter between event and image, between history and visual form, this collection offers an account of the centrality of trauma’s visualization to an understanding of modernity.

304 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 2006

Reviews

[Alena · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of this book was so good. To look at different artworks and the way trauma is portrayed in these different artworks and give an overview over trauma in art and modernity.

However, this book really could have done without the amateur psycho-analysing and the constant references to Freud as the one and only person to have written about trauma (and Freud did so very badly). It should have focused more on the field its writers were familiar with; art. And maybe then trauma would have been dealth with in a more sensitive and sensible manner. Some of the passages really rubbed me the wrong way.

[lena · Rating 3 out of 5]

thesis - interesting