Juxtaposes the writings of psychoanalysts, literary and political theorists, and literary authors who write in a century faced by a new kind of history.

It is rewarding and immensely exciting to follow the twists and turns of Caruth's brilliant and endlessly surprising arguments. -- Michael G. Levine, Rutgers University In these captivating analyses, Cathy Caruth again breaks new ground for literary and trauma studies. Literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical texts from Balzac via Freud and Arendt to Dorfman and Derrida are illuminated by Caruth's brilliant and subtle readings to reveal their stunning historical and political relevance for our twenty-first-century world in which war veterans and torture victims still return from the dead and in which pervasive deliberate deception in politics acquires the weight of actions that violently erase memory in creating new 'events.' Caruth's analyses call for nothing less than a 'rethinking of the very nature of history around the possibility of its erasure'-a most urgent appeal in our days. -- Elisabeth Weber, University of California, Santa Barbara