Literature in the Ashes of History

by Cathy Caruth

What does it mean for history to disappear? Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Cathy Caruth juxtaposes the writings of psychoanalysts, literary and political theorists, and literary authors who write in a century faced by a new kind of history, one that is made up of events that seem to undo, rather than produce, their own remembrance. At the heart of each chapter is the enigma of a history that, in its very unfolding, seems to be slipping away before our grasp. What does it mean for history to disappear? And what does it mean to speak of a history that disappears? These questions, Caruth suggests, lie at the center of the psychoanalytic texts that frame this book, as well as the haunting stories and theoretical arguments that resonate with each other in profound and surprising ways. In the writings of Honoré de Balzac, Hannah Arendt, Ariel Dorfman, Wilhelm Jensen, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Derrida, we encounter, across different stakes and different languages, a variety of narratives that bear witness not simply to the past but also to the pasts we have not known and that repeatedly return us to a future that remains beyond imagination. These stories of trauma cannot be limited to the catastrophes they name, and the theory of catastrophic history may ultimately be written in a language that already lingers in a time that comes to us from the other side of the disaster.

Genres: Theory, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Philosophy, History

144 pages, Paperback

First published November 12, 2013

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

[ben adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short book that is mined for treasure by scholars, it is hard to say what her overall idea is. It is a very obscure read.

[Suzette Kunz · Rating 3 out of 5]

For my dissertation.

[M.E. Rolle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a big fan. Charuth supports outdated Freudian theories about the trauma experience, and fails to provide thorough analyses to support her positions.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Caruth looks at trauma in literature. Not much that I’m going to use from it.