Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History / Edition 20

by Cathy Caruth

Overview

The pathbreaking work that founded the field of trauma studies.

In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century—both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it—we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and reference. Through the notion of trauma, she contends, we come to a new understanding that permits history to arise where immediate understanding may not.

Caruth explores the ways in which the texts of psychoanalysis, literature, and literary theory both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience. Rather than straightforwardly describing actual case studies of trauma survivors, or attempting to elucidate directly the psychiatry of trauma, she examines the complex ways that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and in the stories associated with it. Caruth’s wide-ranging discussion touches on Freud’s theory of trauma as outlined in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She traces the notion of reference and the figure of the falling body in de Man, Kleist, and Kant; the narratives of personal catastrophe in Hiroshima mon amour; and the traumatic address in Lecompte’s reinterpretation of Freud’s narrative of the dream of the burning child.

In this twentieth-anniversary edition of her now classic text, a substantial new afterword addresses major questions and controversies surrounding trauma theory that have arisen over the past two decades. Caruth offers innovative insights into the inherent connection between individual and collective trauma, on the importance of the political and ethical dimensions of the theory of trauma, and on the crucial place of literature in the theoretical articulation of the very concept of trauma. Her afterword serves as a decisive intervention in the ongoing discussions in and about the field.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421421650
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2016
Edition description:	Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	887,487
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.60(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

Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Wound and the Voice
Chapter 1. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History (Freud, Moses and Monotheism)
Chapter 2. Literature and the Enactment of Memory (Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour)
Chapter 3. Traumatic Departures: Survival and History in Freud (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Moses and Monotheism)
Chapter 4. The Falling Body and the Impact of Reference (de Man, Kant, Kleist)
Chapter 5. Traumatic Awakenings (Freud, Lacan, and the Ethics of Memory)
Afterword. Addressing Life: The Literary Voice in the Theory of Trauma
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

J. Hillis Miller

Unclaimed Experience is a splendid work, written with admirable clarity, power, and economy. The book has importance for a number of different fields: for psychoanalysis, for trauma theory or theory of 'post-traumatic stress disorder,' for literary study, for literary theory for cultural and historical studies, and for ethical theory. Each chapter is a classic essay on its topic.

— J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

Robert Jay Lifton

Cathy Caruth has emerged as one of our most innovative scholars on what we call trauma, and on our ways of perceiving and conceptualizing that still mysterious phenomenon.

— Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., author of Hiroshima in America and The Protean Self

Editorial Reviews

Unclaimed Experience is a splendid work, written with admirable clarity, power, and economy. The book has importance for a number of different fields: for psychoanalysis, for trauma theory or theory of 'post-traumatic stress disorder,' for literary study, for literary theory, for cultural and historical studies, and for ethical theory. Each chapter is a classic essay on its topic.
—J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine, author of The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz

Cathy Caruth has emerged as one of our most innovative scholars on what we call trauma, and on our ways of perceiving and conceptualizing that still mysterious phenomenon.
—Robert Jay Lifton, MD, author of Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima

From the Publisher

Unclaimed Experience is a splendid work, written with admirable clarity, power, and economy. The book has importance for a number of different fields: for psychoanalysis, for trauma theory or theory of 'post-traumatic stress disorder,' for literary study, for literary theory, for cultural and historical studies, and for ethical theory. Each chapter is a classic essay on its topic.

J. Hillis Miller

Cathy Caruth has emerged as one of our most innovative scholars on what we call trauma, and on our ways of perceiving and conceptualizing that still mysterious phenomenon.

Robert Jay Lifton