Because traumatic events are unbearable in their horror and intensity, they often exist as memories that are not immediately recognizable as truth. Such experiences are best understood not only through the straightforward acquisition of facts but through a process of discovering where and why conscious understanding and memory fail. Literature, according to Cathy Caruth and others, opens a window on traumatic experience because it teaches readers to listen to what can be told only in indirect and surprising ways. Sociology, film, and political activism can also provide new ways of thinking about and responding to the experience of trauma. In Trauma and Memory, a distinguished group of analysts and critics offer a compelling look at what literature and the new approaches of a variety of clinical and theoretical disciplines bring to the understanding of traumatic experience. Combining two highly-acclaimed special issues of American Imago edited by Caruth, this interdisciplinary collection of essays and interviews will be of interest to analysts and critics concerned with the notion of trauma and the problem of interpretation and, more generally, to those interested in current discussions of subjects such as child abuse, AIDS, and the effects of historical atrocities such as the Holocaust. Contributions by: Georges Bataille, Harold Bloom, Laura Brown, Cathy Caruth, Kai Erikson, Shoshana Felman, Henry Krystal, Claude Lanzmann, Dori Laub, Kevin Newmark, Onno van der Hart, and Bessel van der Kolk. Interviews with: Robert Jay Lifton, Gregg Bordowitz, Douglas Crimp, and Laura Pinsky

Table of Contents:
Preface Part I: Trauma and Experience Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching Chapter 3. Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle Chapter 4. Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow-Up Chapter 5. Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma Chapter 6. Freud: Frontier Concepts, Jewishness, and Interpretation Chapter 7. An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton Part II: Recapturing the Past Chapter 8. Introduction Chapter 9. The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma Chapter 10. Notes on Trauma and Community Chapter 11. The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening With Claude Lanzmann Chapter 12. Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima Chapter 13. Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter Chapter 14. "The AIDS Crisis is Not Over": A Conversation with Gregg Bordowitz, Douglass Crimp, and Laura Pinsky Contributors