Arts of Healing

Giving up the overgeneralized concept of trauma, the contributors to this intriguing volume, following various disciplinary perspectives at the intersection of humanities and social sciences, carefully investigate particular geopolitical, social and cultural contexts of individual and collective traumatic experiences. Whereas classical trauma studies emphasized these experiences’ inaccessibility and unrepresentability, they shift attention to various possibilities and techniques of their healing. -- Vladimir Biti, University of Vienna
Covering a diverse range of writers and thinkers from across literature, film, architecture, philosophy and psychoanalysis, this collection of papers by prominent scholars of the theoretical humanities is a fascinating contribution to the study of the relation between culture and trauma. The diversity of historical and cultural phenomena explored, as well as the conceptual and textual sophistication of its analyses, will ensure this volume’s status as a primary text in the field for decades to come. -- Josh Cohen, Reader in English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths University of London

This is an extremely significant volume addressing a timely issue of great importance and so advancing current debates in the field. The international and eminent contributors bring together the most contemporary theoretical and philosophical approaches, challenging literary and cultural texts and a range of traumatic events in global history in order to investigate the possibilities of cultural healing and articulate, without passing over suffering, ideas of ‘speaking anew’.

-- Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
In this all too timely collection, Arleen Ionescu and Maria Margaroni have assembled essays that thoughtfully draw upon the critical resources of the humanities to reflect on the conditions and limits of old as well as new arts of healing. As they follow through on the editors' commitment to move beyond a general concept of trauma, the richly diverse perspectives represented in this volume crucially challenge commonplace notions of healing as an individual, communal, or national redemption of a lost sense of wholeness and sovereignty, thereby mapping a freshly futural orientation for trauma studies. -- Karyn Ball, Associate Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta