“Trauma and its often symptomatic aftermath pose acute problems for historical representation and understanding. In Writing History, Writing. Trauma and its often symptomatic aftermath pose acute problems for historical representation and understanding. In this study, Dominick LaCapra offers a. Trauma and its aftermath pose acute problems for historical representation and understanding. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick.
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Writing History, Writing Trauma by Dominick LaCapra
Domiinick and its often symptomatic aftermath pose acute problems for historical representation and understanding. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra provides a broad-ranging, critical inquiry into the problem of trauma, notably with respect to major historical events.
In a series of interlocking essays, he explores theoretical and literary-critical attempts to come to terms with trauma as well as the crucial role post-traumatic testimonies—particularly Holocaust testimonies—have assumed in recent thought and writing. In doing so, he jistory psychoanalytic concepts to historical analysis and employs sociocultural and political critique to elucidate trauma and its after effects in culture and in people.
In the first chapter LaCapra addresses trauma from the perspective of history as a discipline.
Writing History, Writing Trauma
He then lays a theoretical groundwork for the book as a whole, exploring the concept of historical specificity and wrriting on the difference between transhistorical and historical trauma.
Subsequent chapters consider how Holocaust testimonies raise the problem of the role of affect and empathy in historical understanding, and respond to the debates surrounding Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
The book’s concluding essay, “Writing About Trauma,” examines the various ways that the voice of trauma emerges in written and oral accounts of historical events. Theoretically ambitious and historically informed, Writing History, Writing Trauma is an important contribution from one of today’s foremost experts on trauma.
Writing History, Writing Trauma
Important reading not only to trauma theorists and their critics, but to historians and literary critics of all persuasions invested in rethinking truma relationship between trauma, history and ethics. LaCapra’s discussions of historiography, philosophy, and psychoanalysis are extraordinarily lucid, and this book is a brilliant example of some of the capabilities of contemporary trauma theory in analyzing representations of trauma.
That dream of totalization, however, is precisely what LaCapra casts doubt upon in his important new book. LaCapra both uses and transcends contemporary critical theory in assessing the influence of trauma on present-day historical writing.
No one has done more to sustain the vitality and humanity of critical thinking in the face of those historical events—above all the Shoah—which seem to defy comprehension.
These essays will frame the debates on the ‘writing of trauma’ for years to come.
LaCapra lays out, with the care, precision, and compassion we have come to expect from him, the terms and distinctions by which we can begin to think through the complexities of post-traumatic writing. These essays provide absolutely crucial points of orientation in the haunted spaces of post-Holocaust culture, thought, and representation.
Few other historians have so forcefully laacapra to the power of empathy in addressing historical trauma, and none have done so much to place history and critical theory into a mutually enriching and necessary dialogue. Writing History, Writing Trauma offers a critique of unalloyed ‘objectivism,’ combined with a lively attempt to conceptualize how history writing should deal with the ‘post-traumatic’—a category wrlting is merging more and more with ‘post-modernism,’ ‘post-structuralism,’ and ‘post-Holocaust.
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Writing History, Writing Trauma. Dominick LaCapra is in the Andrew D. White Center for Humanities at Cornell University. Explorations in Memory Caruth, Cathy.