Overview

In these essays, Michael S. Roth uses psychoanalysis to build a richer understanding of history, and then takes a more expansive conception of history to decode the cultural construction of memory. He first examines the development in nineteenth-century France of medical criteria for diagnosing memory disorders, which signal fundamental changes in the understanding of present and past. He next explores links between historical consciousness and issues relating to the psyche, including trauma and repression and hypnosis and therapy. Roth turns to the work of postmodern theorists in connection with the philosophy of history and then examines photography's capacity to capture traces of the past. He considers how we strive to be faithful to the past even when we don't care about getting it right or using it productively. Roth concludes with essays defending pragmatic and reflexive liberal education. Drawing on his experiences as a teacher and academic leader, he speaks of living with the past without being dominated by it.

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9780231145688

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<p>This collection of essays revises our normal conceptions of the relation between history and the past. Roth shows how the past with which certain nineteenth-century hysterics and obsessive compulsive personalities could not live, had little to do with that history which the historians and philosophers of history were at the same time so assiduously mapping and organizing in their professional studies. Nor were those afflicted by the past in the form of nostalgia and melancholy effectively treatable by the kind of knowledge of the past in which historian dealt. Freud's genius was to show that our pasts are not made of a single, shared whole cloth, that they are parsed in radically different ways, that they are not fixed and passive residues of past presents, but are active and often destructive chimeras of alienated desires. More than any other thinker, Freud put the body back into thought about our pasts and our presents' relation to them. All this is a challenge to reth

Roth rules! A compulsive peeper into the corners of the historical past, he is the visual historian's historian. Not only because Roth is smart, not only because he finds odd things that captured people's attention in the past, not only because he is theoretically sophisticated without being dogmatic, but also because as a thinker and writer he is always able to engage his audience on every topic. -- Sander L. Gilman, Emory University With critical agility and grace, Roth's life-affirming and judicious work urges us to absorb the critical lessons of postmodern irony and resist the lure of cold and superior sophistication in favor of efforts to find meaning in ever renewed inquiries into who we think we are and what we want to be. -- Carolyn J. Dean, Brown University, author of Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust In this excellent work, Roth provides sobering antidotes to recent hyperboles, claiming the most abject forms of victimization and trauma have recently become the ultimate forms of legitimation. A lucid, boldly interdisciplinary book, Roth's work will stimulate exchange among historians, critical theorists, literary critics, students of visual culture, and all readers concerned about the fate of liberal education. -- Dominick La Capra, Cornell University This collection revises our normal conceptions of the relation between 'history' and 'the past.' Roth's essays challenge us to rethink the links among history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the body. -- Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz exceptional and wide-ranging -- Robert Eaglestone Times Higher Education 1/26/2012

Author Information

Michael S. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of five books, including The Ironist's Cage: Trauma, Memory, and the Construction of History and Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France. He has also edited several books of intellectual and cultural history, and he curated an exhibition entitled Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture, which opened at the Library of Congress.

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