One could not wish for a more judicious, lucid, and compassionate guide through the complexities of post-traumatic writing than LaCapra. 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. -- Eric Santner, University of Chicago In these typically cogent essays, LaCapra once again works to determine subtle and necessary distinctions between history and trauma, absence and loss, and theory and practice while never reducing them to binaries. Few other historians have so forcefully appealed 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. -- Carolyn Dean, Brown University These are essays on the cutting edge, consistent in theme and perspective, carefully argued, sometimes personal, always clear. 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 that is merging more and more with 'post-modernism,' 'post-structuralism,' and 'post-Holocaust.'. -- Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University
Dominick LaCapra is in the Andrew D. White Center for Humanities at Cornell University.
LaCapra's analysis of trauma is folded into an ambitious and compelling reflection on the possibilities for a genuinely cross-disciplinary theoretical dialogue on history... Important reading not only to trauma theorists and their critics, but to historians and literary critics of all persuasions invested in rethinking the relationship between trauma, history and ethics. -- Debarati Sanyal SubStance Intellectually complex yet lucid. -- Erik Weisengruber Literary Research Thoughtful and compelling... 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. Tikkun The strength of LaCapra's text lies in its urgency, in the clarity of its commitment to historiographic adequacy and the constructive potential of a psychoanalytic mode of interpretation, and in its appeal to a sense of civic responsibility. -- Nina Goss and Gary Handwerk Criticism Until now trauma studies lacked the kind of discerning metacommentary that would adjudicate among its emergent logics, truth claims, intellectual strategies, objects of analysis, and scholarly positions. That dream of totalization, however, is precisely what LaCapra casts doubt upon in his important new book. -- Walter Kalaidjian Modernism/Modernity LaCapra's insightful and compassionate Writing History, Writing Trauma concerns the interpretation of historical traumas such as the Holocaust and the traumas' enduring effects. LaCapra both uses and transcends contemporary critical theory in assessing the influence of trauma on present-day historical writing. -- Richard L. Rubenstein Holocaust and Genocide Studies
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