Unclaimed Experience

Unclaimed Experience by Cathy Caruth

"If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet."-from the Introduction 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 is impossible. In her wide-ranging discussion, Caruth engages Freud's theory of trauma as outlined in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle; 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.

"'Unclaimed Experience' is a splendid work, written with admirable clarity, power, and economyThe 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

Cathy Caruth is associate professor of comparative literature and English and director of the Program in Comparative Literature at Emory University. Her books include Trauma: Explorations in Memory and Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud, both available from Johns Hopkins.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780801852473
ISBN 10	0801852471
Title	Unclaimed Experience
Author	Cathy Caruth
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Johns Hopkins University Press
Year published	1996-08-12
Number of pages	168
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable