Cathy Caruth ist eine Professorin für Geisteswissenschaften, deren Werk tief in die Bereiche Trauma, Erzählung und Geschichte eintaucht. Ihre literarischen Analysen untersuchen, wie unsere Erfahrungen durch die Geschichten geformt werden, die wir erzählen, und wie diese Erzählungen unser Verständnis von Wahrheit und Fiktion beeinflussen. Caruths Ansatz verbindet oft Literaturkritik mit Psychoanalyse und Philosophie, um die komplexen Zusammenhänge zwischen Sprache, Erinnerung und menschlicher Erfahrung aufzudecken. Ihre Arbeit ist unerlässlich, um zu verstehen, wie Literatur unsere tiefsten Traumata und gelebten Realitäten widerspiegelt und formt.
The afterword provides a critical perspective on current debates within the field, offering insights that contribute significantly to the discourse. It addresses key issues and challenges, positioning itself as a vital commentary that encourages further exploration and dialogue among scholars and practitioners.
Features interviews with a diverse group of leaders in the theorization of, and response to, traumatic experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
These stories of trauma cannot be limited to the catastrophes they name, and the theory of catastrophic history may ultimately be written in a language that already lingers in a time that comes to us from the other side of the disaster.
The book explores the tension between traditional English empiricism, particularly Locke's view of self-understanding through observation, and the critiques posed by Romantic poets and German philosophers. Cathy Caruth reinterprets Locke's work as a narrative where "experience" holds a complex and uncanny significance. She examines how Wordsworth, Kant, and Freud engage with this narrative, not merely as opponents of empiricism but as grappling with the intricate relationship between language and experience in their own writings.