Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (Suny Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture) [Paperback]

Walter A. Davis (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0791448347 | ISBN-13: 978-0791448342 | Publication Date: February 2001

Attempts to comprehend the traumatic significance of Hiroshima in order to construct a new theory of history.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Through a critique of history--as a reality, a discipline, and a way of writing--Deracination challenges the basic theoretical tenets of both humanism and postmodernism. As a discipline, history is currently undergoing what Heidegger would call a productive "crisis," and a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and Stephen Greenblatt, have begun to reexamine the cognitive assumptions and narrative paradigms that inform the discipline. This book radicalizes such developments in order to construct both a new theory of history as well as a new concept of how histories should be written. To make the interrogation concrete, the book focuses on Hiroshima and the ways in which the trauma of that event has been repressed by the discourses that historians have fashioned in order to "explain" what happened on August 6, 1945.

About the Author

Walter A. Davis is Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of several books, including Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience and Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. He recently published the companion piece to the present volume: The Holocaust Memorial: A Play about Hiroshima.

Product Details

• Paperback: 301 pages
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr (February 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791448347
• ISBN-13: 978-0791448342
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #654,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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