Literature in the Ashes of History

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.

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsPart One: Literature and the Life Drive1. Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and SurvivalSigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle2. The Claims of the Dead: History, Haunted Property, and the LawHonoré de Balzac, Colonel ChabertPart Two: After the End3. Lying and HistoryHannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics" and "Lying in Politics"4. Disappearing History: Scenes of Trauma in the Theater of Human RightsAriel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden5. Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of HistoryWilhelm Jensen, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques DerridaAfterwordNotesIndex

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