In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth explains how trauma can be used to understand history. She does so using the texts of psychoanalysis, literature, and literary theory that speak about traumatic experience. She examines the complex ways of fact and fiction in the language of trauma and in the stories associated with it. Addressing Freud’s theory of trauma she traces 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.
The book addresses controversies surrounding trauma theory that have come to light over the past two decades. Caruth
