Overview

From the Napoleonic Wars to the invention of the railway to the shell shock of World War I, writers tried to give voice to the suffering that war and industrial technology had wrought all around them. Yet they, like the doctors who treated these victims, repeatedly ran up against the incapacity of language to describe such anguish; those who suffered trauma, those who tried to heal it, and those who represented it were all unable to find the appropriate words. In The Language of Trauma, John Zilcosky uncovers the reactions of three major central European writers E.T.A. Hoffmann, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka to the birth of modern trauma in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Zilcosky makes the case that Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka managed to find the language of trauma precisely by not attempting to name the trauma conclusively and instead allowing their writing to mimic the experience itself. Just as the victims' symptoms seemed not to correspond to a physical cause, the writers' words did not connect directly to the objects of the world. While doctors attempted to overcome this indeterminacy, these writers embraced and investigated it; they sought a language that described language's tragic limits and that, in so doing, exemplified the wider literary and philosophical crisis of their time. Zilcosky boldly argues that this linguistic scepticism emerged together with the medical inability to name the experience of trauma. He thereby places trauma where it belongs: at the heart of both medicine's diagnostic predicament and modern literature's most daring experiments.

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9781487509422

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Reviews

"""For about a century, psychoanalysis has been telling us that 'the uncanny' is an effect of infantile castration anxiety. And for about half a century, deconstruction has been claiming that it is the mirror hall of literature's inherent self-reflexivity that produces the uncanny. By tracing the roots of this term in the battles of nineteenth- and twentieth-century mobile and industrialized warfare, John Zilcosky puts the uncanny and its corollary, 'trauma, ' back on their historical feet."" - Wolf Kittler, University of California, Santa Barbara ""This book uncovers the hidden traumas of technology and war in Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka. As such, it represents a major contribution to our understanding of how modern writers gave voice to the experience of suffering and pain. Zilcosky deftly shows how the modern discourses of psychiatry, medicine, and insurance contribute to a crisis of causality that both troubles and fuels a distinctly modernist aesthetic."" - Kata Gellen, Duke University ""This formidable scholar's newest book--scrupulously researched and beautifully written--studies the interinvolvement of the modern discourses of law, medicine, and literature in historical fact, under the shadow of war. John Zilcosky describes the immense social, economic, and intellectual-historical effects of disciplines founded on the skeptical reading of signs and symptoms in the absence of substantial evidence. This discovery informs Zilcosky's original and altogether brilliant criticism of works 'quietly permeated by war and by industrialized trauma, ' medical detection, and accident insurance."" - Stanley Corngold Princeton University"

For about a century, psychoanalysis has been telling us that 'the uncanny' is an effect of infantile castration anxiety. And for about half a century, deconstruction has been claiming that it is the mirror hall of literature's inherent self-reflexivity that produces the uncanny. By tracing the roots of this term in the battles of nineteenth- and twentieth-century mobile and industrialized warfare, John Zilcosky puts the uncanny and its corollary, 'trauma, ' back on their historical feet. - Wolf Kittler, Professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara This book uncovers the hidden traumas of technology and war in Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka. As such, it represents a major contribution to our understanding of how modern writers gave voice to the experience of suffering and pain. Zilcosky deftly shows how the modern discourses of psychiatry, medicine, and insurance contribute to a crisis of causality that both troubles and fuels a distinctly modernist aesthetic. - Kata Gellen, Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Duke University This formidable scholar's newest book--scrupulously researched and beautifully written--studies the interinvolvement of the modern discourses of law, medicine, and literature in historical fact, under the shadow of war. John Zilcosky describes the immense social, economic, and intellectual-historical effects of disciplines founded on the skeptical reading of signs and symptoms in the absence of substantial evidence. This discovery informs Zilcosky's original and altogether brilliant criticism of works 'quietly permeated by war and by industrialized trauma, ' medical detection, and accident insurance. - Stanley Corngold, Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature, Princeton University

Author Information

John Zilcosky is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.

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