Cathy Caruth
· Class of 1916 Professor of English Comparative Literature Literatures in EnglishCornell University · English
Active 1983–2025
About
Cathy Caruth is a Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, teaching in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. Her academic interests include literary theory, the languages of trauma and testimony, and contemporary discourses concerning the annihilation and survival of language. She has authored books such as Literature in the Ashes of History (2013) and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (2014). Her research focuses on Milton and the Romantics, literary theory, and the literature and theory of trauma.
Research topics
- Political Science
- History
- Law
- Literature
- Psychoanalysis
- Psychology
- Art
- Ancient history
- Archaeology
Selected publications
Roundtable: Memory, Literature, and “Literary Memory Studies”
2025-01-01 · 2 citations
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingJordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literature · 2022 · 2 citations
- Political Science
- History
- Literature
This paper aims to show how Robert Lowell’s first volumes Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary’s Castle can be examined from a trauma conceptual point of view. It attempts to explore Lowell’s representation of his traumatic experiences in his early poetry by drawing heavily on Freud’s and Cathy Caruth’s theorizations of trauma. More specifically, the paper attempts to illustrate how Lowell’s mode of representing his traumatic experience of World War II is based on witnessing and documenting the war events and how he endeavors to use this mode of representation as a strategy for transcending his war trauma. In his first two volumes, Lowell identifies with the war sufferers and becomes so much imbued with their trauma that he starts to experience a secondary trauma. However, he attempts to survive his trauma by using two alternative strategies which conform to specific psychoanalytic techniques of healing trauma. He achieves this through his spiritual resignation and alternatively through his description of the traumatic scenes of World War II in order to reassure himself that these war scenes are only a matter of the past. Keywords: War poetry; Robert Lowell; Land of Unlikeness; Lord Weary’s Castle; trauma; Freud; Cathy
11 Trauma, Justice, and the Political Unconscious: Arendt and Felman’s Journey to Jerusalem
Berghahn Books · 2022-10-11 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingResponse: Trauma, Justice, and the Political Unconscious: Arendt and Felman’s Journey to Jerusalem
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-03-30
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingFordham University Press eBooks · 2022-03-30
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingGlobalization and the Theory of Trauma
Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 8 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- History
- Political Science
In the interview with Cathy Caruth, “Globalization and the Theory of Trauma,” the term “trauma” (and its variants) becomes a lever for rethinking the study of globalization and the concepts that would be indispensable for that study. Caruth shows how a renewed attention to how the experience of trauma changes the way we think about translation, comparison, politics, and even death. In the end, Caruth suggests that trauma opens up these terms to an internal vulnerability, thus making literature, which is always moving outside of itself, a significant “site” for thinking through this radical exposure.
2020-05-11 · 3 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe theory of trauma, as it arose in Freudian psychoanalysis just before the turn of the twentieth century, is distinguished by its focus on an inherently temporal structure: the delay, within the experience of catastrophe, that defers its occurrence to the future. This chapter suggests that the notion of trauma, as it arises in S. Freud’s work and the tradition that follows it, is not, fundamentally, a problem of representation, but a question of address. The trauma is also the collapse of address inscribed as a possibility within every appeal as it crosses, not fully heard, just whispered, from mortal speaker to the one he or she would address, a mortal call to a mortal listening. The therapy, interestingly enough, will proceed to focus explicitly on an exercise involving the language of address, in an apparent attempt to allow Mario to tell his story.
Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding"Who Speaks from the Site Of Trauma?": An Interview with Cathy Caruth
diacritics · 2019-01-01 · 11 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingIn celebration of the 20th-anniversary edition of <i>Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History</i>, we conducted an interview with Cathy Caruth at her home on April 20, 2018. The interview covered, among other things, Caruth's response to her critics around the contested notion of "unrepresentability," her take on the crucial relation between theory and testimony, as well as her recent rethinking of address around its failure and new possibility on the site of trauma.
Parting Words: Trauma, Silence and Survival
2017-11-01 · 11 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter proposes that Freud's insight into trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his new understanding of personal and of collective history in the face of war, lies precisely in the striking and enigmatic leap that juxtaposes the nightmares of war to the child's game. It discusses Freud's enigmatic move in the theory of trauma from the drive for death to the drive for life, from the reformulating of life around the witness to death, to the possibility of witnessing and making history in creative acts of life. From the perspective of Freud's rethinking of life around its traumatic significance, the child's game thus peculiarly re-enacts the incomprehensible moment of the mother's act of leaving and reshapes the very life of the child as the unconscious witness to the death he has survived. The origin of life as the death drive is itself repeated, Freud audaciously suggests, and is repeated precisely in the form of a game (Spiel).
Frequent coauthors
- 10 shared
Dominick LaCapra
- 10 shared
Shoshana Felman
Emory University
- 9 shared
Jonathan Culler
- 9 shared
Benedetto Bordone
Ibero American University
- 9 shared
Arleen Ionescu
- 9 shared
Lawrence L. Langer
- 9 shared
Éric L. Santner
- 4 shared
Robert Lowell
Fayoum University
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