1. Caruth CathyUnclaimed Experience: Trauma. Narrative, and HistoryJohn Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London 1996, p 3.
2. Countering the argument that using poststructuralism as a method of critique leads to ‘political and ethical paralysis’, Caruth argues that the notion of trauma enables recognition of the possibility of a history which is ‘no longer based on simple understandings of experience and reference’. Moreover, she argues it is ‘through the notion of trauma [that] we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not.’ Caruth above note 3 at 11.
3. Felman above note 1 at 743.