Trauma: Explorations in Memory

by Cathy Caruth (Editor)

Because traumatic events are unbearable in their horror and intensity, they often exist as memories that are not immediately recognizable 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.

In Trauma and Memory, a distinguished group of analysts and critics offer a compelling look at what literature and the new approaches of a variety of clinical and theoretical disciplines bring to the understanding of traumatic experience. Combining two highly-acclaimed special issues of American Imago edited by Caruth, this interdisciplinary collection of essays and interviews will 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.

Contributions by: Georges Bataille, Harold Bloom, Laura Brown, Cathy Caruth, Kai Erikson, Shoshana Felman, Henry Krystal, Claude Lanzmann, Dori Laub, Kevin Newmark, Onno van der Hart, and Bessel van der Kolk. Interviews with: Robert Jay Lifton, Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, and Laura Pinsky

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction, Psychology, Philosophy, Grad School, Research, Self Help

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 24, 1995

About the author

Cathy Caruth (born 1955) is Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University and is appointed in the departments of English and Comparative Literature. She taught previously at Yale and at Emory University, where she helped build the Department of Comparative Literature. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1988 and is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996); she is also editor of Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) and with Deborash Esch of Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (Rutgers University Press, 1995).

Reviews

[Carolyn Zaikowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely important book of essays about trauma and trauma theory. If you are interested in learning about trauma and its relevance to politics, literary studies, and language, this is a good book to begin with. I recommend reading it with Judith Herman's "Trauma and Recovery".

[Lauren McDonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was for a class but was truly so fascinating!! the theory of how trauma affects experience and life as a result is so fascinating to me! if you can take a class on this and are interested please do!!

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Who can find a proper grave for the damaged mosaics of the mind, where they may rest in pieces? "

[erynde · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Dori Laub's article in this book and I enjoyed it a lot. it was interesting to read the holocaust survivors' thoughts and memories. I think these feelings are not specifically limited to the holocaust trauma and it is good to read different views on trauma and its effects even though it's not directly related to certain sorts of trauma.

[Ai Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was okay. A kind of odd collection, felt pretty disconnected in parts, though maybe that's because so much of the book was rooted in Holocaust studies with which I'm not hugely familiar. The last chapter was for me (for maybe obvious reasons) the most interesting, but yeah the collection as a whole was weird but some of it was interesting.

[Eva Puyuelo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this work as part of the bibliography I am using for my M.A. Thesis and I am not nearly disappointed with my decision. Caruth's selection of essays has proven to be excellent, if not totally moving. She succeeds in providing her readership with a complete and meticulous account on the theoretical, though practical at times, development of the traumatic experience in an attempt to articulate the voice of silenced witnesses and lost claims. A must-read as an introduction to the notions concealed beneath the baffling concept of trauma and its ties with past, memory and literature.

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I especially liked the essay on baudelaire by kevin newmark. It was interesting. I didn't get to read all the essays in the book. Shoshanna Felman's essay was fascinating -- if only because I've never seen anything like that happen before. Much of what she says is very incisive too. But enjoyable and insightful as it was it didn't make me go !!!!! -- or AWWW -- which would've earned it a 5 star rating. Or YES YES YES.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

cuts to the heart of the whole "memories that are not immediately recognizeable as truth" subject in a great collection of essays

[richard castaneda · Rating 3 out of 5]

read for a class

[Suzette Kunz · Rating 3 out of 5]

For my PhD.

[Jodell · Rating 2 out of 5]

it was an older book and well i gleaned a few things that resonated with me but just a few.