Literature in the Ashes of History

by Cathy Caruth

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421411552
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	12/23/2013
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	7.60(w) x 11.40(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

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.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Part 1 Literature and the Life Drive

1 Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle 3

2 The Claims of the Dead: History, Haunted Property, and the Law Honoré de Balzac, Colonel Chabert 18

Part 2 After the End

3 Lying and History Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics" and "Lying in Politics" 39

4 Disappearing History: Scenes of Trauma in the Theater of Human Rights Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden 54

5 Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of History Wilhelm Jensen Sigmund Freud Jacques Derrida 75

Afterword 91

Notes 93

Index 123

What People are Saying About This

Michael G. Levine

It is rewarding and immensely exciting to follow the twists and turns of Caruth’s brilliant and endlessly surprising arguments.

From the Publisher

It is rewarding and immensely exciting to follow the twists and turns of Caruth’s brilliant and endlessly surprising arguments.
—Michael G. Levine, Rutgers University

In these captivating analyses, Cathy Caruth again breaks new ground for literary and trauma studies. Literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical texts from Balzac via Freud and Arendt to Dorfman and Derrida are illuminated by Caruth's brilliant and subtle readings to reveal their stunning historical and political relevance for our twenty-first-century world in which war veterans and torture victims still return from the dead and in which pervasive deliberate deception in politics acquires the weight of actions that violently erase memory in creating new 'events.' Caruth's analyses call for nothing less than a 'rethinking of the very nature of history around the possibility of its erasure'—a most urgent appeal in our days.
—Elisabeth Weber, University of California, Santa Barbara

Elisabeth Weber

In these captivating analyses, Cathy Caruth again breaks new ground for literary and trauma studies. Literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical texts from Balzac via Freud and Arendt to Dorfman and Derrida are illuminated by Caruth's brilliant and subtle readings to reveal their stunning historical and political relevance for our twenty-first-century world in which war veterans and torture victims still return from the dead and in which pervasive deliberate deception in politics acquires the weight of actions that violently erase memory in creating new 'events.' Caruth's analyses call for nothing less than a 'rethinking of the very nature of history around the possibility of its erasure'—a most urgent appeal in our days.

Editorial Reviews

Of immense significance to scholars in multiple disciplines, including history, literature and literary theory, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, this book will set the tone for future discussion... Essential.

Choice

Of immense significance to scholars in multiple disciplines, including history, literature and literary theory, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, this book will set the tone for future discussion... Essential.
—Choice

Caruth, then, presents a "new kind" of history: a history that is itself under erasure and that calls for an urgent reimagining of the way we think of—and write about—the past.
—Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies

From the Publisher

Caruth, then, presents a "new kind" of history: a history that is itself under erasure and that calls for an urgent reimagining of the way we think of—and write about—the past.

Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies