Description
Book SynopsisFrom 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 corr
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction: Literature, Trauma, and the Sign of Illness 1. Hoffmann at the Battle of Dresden: “The Sandman” and the Napoleonic Wars 2. Freud and World War I: The Uncanny Trauma of Contagion 3. Inexplicable Tears: Trains, Wars, and Kafka’s Aesthetic of Indeterminacy Conclusion: The Poetics of Trauma: Simulation, Causality, and the Crisis of Insurance Notes Index
