Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature
Kaplan is a theorist of film and cultural studies who has made widely recognized contributions to psychoanalytic and feminist theory. Here she explores the effects of trauma on individuals and "collectives," by which she means groups with long histories of being terrorized, such as the indigenous peoples of Australia, and also groups that form suddenly, as the survivors of 9/11 did. Situating her investigation in the rich and conflicting approaches to trauma that have developed out of Freud's late writings—as well as current work in neuroscience and textual analysis in the humanities (including analyses of visual texts)—Kaplan raises important questions about what victims have suffered and about the opportunities and responsibilities of witnessing. The phenomenon of vicarious trauma, as experienced by witnesses and therapists, offers a way to distinguish what she calls "empty empathy" from translation, which in its various meanings provides Kaplan with her guiding metaphor in this work. Her precise depiction of relations in [End Page 171] visual media demonstrates both the difficulties and the possibilities of translating trauma across the gaps that define its existence.
Beverly Haviland, senior lecturer and visiting associate professor of American civilization at Brown University, is the author of Henry James's Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene and is currently writing a book on the representation of child sexual abuse in literature.
