"Remembering, Repeating. . . "

Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 232 pp.  + 5 halftones. $40.00.

Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. ix + 274 pp. $49.95; $19.95 paper.

Trauma analysis emerged in the 1990s as an explicit, cross-disciplinary method of theoretical inquiry.¹ In the study of the Holocaust, especially, but also in the study of modernity, slavery, race, gender, and what came to feel like all forms of suffering or shock, fundamental or regional, trauma surfaced as a key term for categorizing experience, a concept with which the work of Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, and Paul de Man came into contact. Most notably, Cathy Caruth undertook to show that trauma—including those foundational traumas through which an identity is forged—remained foreign to experience, a source of blind repetition rather than self-conscious understanding. At about the same time as Caruth was theorizing trauma, Peter Novick, in The Holocaust in American Life, argued that the Holocaust had left U.S. culture virtually unaffected.² Despite his different methodology, tone, and audience, Novick's argument resonated with Caruth's argument. For in arguing that the effects of the Holocaust remained virtually imperceptible, Novick also suggested that it had yet to be experienced. Thus for the theorist and the historian both, experience, rather than becoming a source of knowledge or learning, instead remained unrealized or, to use Caruth's phrase, "unclaimed." Two recent books—Dominick LaCapra's History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory and Amy Hungerford's The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification—promise alternatives to these accounts of experience. These books—the one by an established historian, the other by a younger literary critic—both focus on the rhetoric of contemporary theory (and in Hungerford's case, on literature as well). Yet more so than conventional analytic projects, both books also are polemics against the use (and abuse) of specific tropes, tropes that, in the opinions of these authors, work against the possibility of distinguishing between actual and virtual experience. More specifically, LaCapra identifies and condemns the hyperbolic rhetoric of apocalypse that he finds at work in much poststructuralist theory, and Hungerford focuses on what she perceives to be the damaging effects of personification, in particular the personification of texts, whereby the difference between actual and fictional persons comes to dissolve. While both books alert us to the violence of a rhetoric that aims to be or to describe the ethical, their efforts to expunge violence in the name of experience nevertheless obscure the very insight into rhetorical violence that they offer.

In History in Transit, LaCapra returns to some of the arguments that he put forth in his earlier studies of trauma.³ The new book has much in common with his earlier work, yet the fact that neither the Holocaust nor the concept of trauma appears in the title also indicates that something has changed. In lieu of the Holocaust (or Auschwitz, its contested metonym), LaCapra offers us terms that seem positively transhistorical: history, identity, and experience. And while LaCapra is concerned to make claims for these concepts, he also is concerned to figure them historically rather than transhistorically. For LaCapra understands the impulse toward the transhistorical as symptomatic of a widespread and, in his opinion, deeply troublesome tendency on the part of critical theory (the final term in his subtitular triumvirate). Hence the title History in Transit is at once a description, an act, and an argument. It evokes and resists the transhistorical impulse, arguing that historians need to think critically about history, to think about history as a mobile, unstable, or transitional term, rather than as a frozen concept, and that theorists need to approach their concepts with the modesty of a historical perspective, rather than the reach of a transhistorical (hyperbolic) one. History, moreover, signals both the object and the field of study, and LaCapra takes up...