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. ''An unusually informative, as well as sensitive, series of essayswith important ramifications for interdisciplinary theory and both social and literary thought. Caruth and her contributors work at the very intersection of contemporary life and scholarship.''--Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University.''The combination of theoretical articles about trauma with interviews about its ongoing effects is a particular strength--and a particularly appropriate approach when the topic itself is silence or testimony about trauma.''--Alan Bass, Ph.D, Psychoanalyst 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
""The most thought-provoking book I have read this year is probably Cathy Caruth's anthology Trauma: Explorations in Memory. It's a 1995 collection of essays by a range of authors from the fields of psychoanalysis and literary and cultural criticism, including the film-maker Claude Lanzmann (Shoah). The frequently mechanical and lifeless nature of traumatised discourse, the question of how you listen and communicate, and the possible moral obligation to resist understanding the perpetrators are some of the themes, but there are others, too, as relevant today as they were then.""
