Trauma and Visuality in Modernity

In recent years, trauma has emerged as an important lens for the analysis of cultural productions. Most such analyses, however, have focused on literary works, despite the fact that the experience of trauma - which, by definition, is imperfectly apprehended in the moment of experience - is susceptible to subsequent processing by means of the visual arts. Although a few works of art history and criticism have addressed the issue of trauma in the context of the Holocaust, the larger question of visual representations of trauma during the modern period remains largely unaddressed. This collection will be among the first books to apply to trauma in visual productions the same careful analysis that has already been applied to the topic in literary ones.
Contents: Section One: Image; Trauma as Representation: A Meditation on Manet and Johns - Isabelle Wallace; Walker Evans´ Depression and the Trauma of Photography - Eric Rosenberg; Section Two: Monument; Canova´s Penitent Madeleine: On Trauma´s Prehistory - Erika Naginski; When Memory Speaks: A Monument Bears Witness - Lisa Saltzman; Section Three: Performance and Installation; Car Crash, 1960 - Judith Rodenbeck; "Normal Ills": On Embodiment, Victimization, and the Origins of Feminist Art - Anna Chave; The "Rememory" of Slavery: Kara Walker´s The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven - Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw; Section Four: Film; Literature and the Enactment of Memory (Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour) - Cathy Caruth; The Revivifying Artist: Christian Boltanski´s Efforts to Close the Gap - Ernst van Alphen; Section Five: Historiography; The Post-Traumatic Turn and the Art of Walid Ra´ad and Krzystof Wodiczko: From Theory to Trope to Beyond - Mark Jarzombek.