This article discusses the representation of law in Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the context of legal philosophy. Beloved’s contribution to the legal humanities has been described in terms of the contrast Morrison dramatizes between two visions of law: the violence of human chattel slavery embodied by the titular ghost, Beloved, and the communal act of solidarity that exorcizes her from her mother’s house. Yet this characterization neglects the associations Morrison draws in Beloved and in her metacommentary between the ghost (...) and other juridical forms, including personality and property. This article proposes an interpretation of Beloved that reads the ghost as a metaphor for the modern, metaphysicalized sense of the legal person for whom self-possession has become a prerequisite for action. Through a reading of Beloved that considers the final version of the novel against an unpublished earlier ending revealed by Morrison’s papers, I argue that Beloved challenges the reducibility of modern personhood to reflexive ownership. (shrink)

In the UK, the writing of Doris Lessing has frequently been associated with left–wing politics and the second–wave feminist movement. Critics have concentrated primarily on issues of class and gender and have focused their attention on novels published in the 1950s and 1960s. This essay suggests that Lessing's work is over–ripe for reassessment in relation to ideas from post-colonial theory. Her writing repeatedly addresses questions about national identity and its imbrications with ‘race’. These ideas intersect in complex ways with her (...) more familiar analysis of gender and class. This essay discusses Lessing's recent novel The Sweetest Dream (2001), which was widely read as an attack on the political idealism of the 1960s. It relates the novel to her collection of essays, African Laughter (1992), her recent essay on the situation in Zimbabwe, ‘The Jewel of Africa’ (2003) and the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade (1997). Zimbabwe (previously Southern Rhodesia) is of crucial importance in these works. The article explores how Lessing makes use of notions of city, home and memory that can be instructively compared with some of Toni Morrison's ideas in her novel Beloved (1987) and the essays ‘Home’ (1998) and ‘The Site of Memory’ (1990). Lessing revises the notion of ‘home’ so that it becomes capable of both recognizing racial and national differences and moving outside them. She also interprets memory as productive for the individual and the nation only when it becomes, as Morrison would say, ‘rememory’: when it can acknowledge the importance of imagination in dealing with trauma and thus suggest the fluctuating, mobile status of identity. The article demonstrates that similar ideas about home and memory are present in her fiction, essay and autobiography, indicating that her intention is to explore generic classification and blur the boundaries between different methods of writing personal and political history. Lessing's work strongly suggests the possibility that apparently ‘fictional’ writings may be more fruitful than ostensibly factual ones in allowing individuals and nations to make sense of their immediate pasts. (shrink)

Forgetting Futures reignites the debate about the crisis of memory and the search to understand the relationship between past and present, remembering and forgetting. In the book Petar Ramadanovic presents an elegant critique of the most significant concepts of memory, from Plato to Nietzsche, as he challenges the prevalent, Aristotelain understanding of memory as mere repeated presentation of the past in the present. Ramadanovic skillfully examines the power of traumatic memory in history. Through an analysis of Cathy Caruth and a (...) ground breaking revisionist interpretation of Toni Morrison's Beloved he shows how the memory of the Holocaust and slavery has shaped American identity. This unique study of memory places trauma, identity, and race under the intellectual microscope resulting in a book of great use for literary and cultural studies scholars, and educated readers seeking to learn more about the relationship between history and memory. (shrink)

The book ends with a Hegelian interpretation of the idea of memory mobilized in Toni Morrison's and Primo Levi's literary works—examples of spirit's 'absolute memory.'.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PrefaceMary Jacobus (bio)Trauma theory, considered as a branch of psychoanalysis, focuses on the lasting effects on the psyche of events that—whether because of their devastating nature or because the psyche is unprepared or too immature to deal with them—cannot be integrated into the onward movement of patient’s lives. The trauma can never be undone; but perhaps the patient may be helped to live with, even mourn, its aftereffects. Some (...) approaches to trauma emphasize the event itself, along with the difficulty, and the need, to relive or re-present it. Some emphasize the structural nature of a trauma which may even be constitutive of subjectivity (castration anxiety, for instance, or primitive anxieties about separation and object loss). Still other approaches point to the meaning of the trauma to the individual, arguing that only by exploring the preexisting constellation of object relations can the significance of the trauma to that particular individual be understood. Trauma may plunge the survivor into never completed mourning, or replace an ordinary guilt with an unresolvable one. Whatever the different inflection of trauma theory, it derives its contours from psychoanalysis, past and present, and, in particular, from the impact on Freud and his successors of some of the most devastating and momentous historical events of modern times, including modern warfare, the Holocaust, and industrialization. But trauma theory also takes account of events that happen (both chronically and diachronically, so to speak) in the intimacy of the family and in the ambiguously interpersonal and social dimensions of sexuality, where events intersect with issues involving gender, power, and powerlessness as well as with preexisting psychic structures.The essays in this collection arise not only from the continuing engagement with trauma theory on the part of psychoanalysts in their clinical and therapeutic work with patients, but from the surge of interest in trauma theory viewed as a way to invest the study of literature with urgent concerns, at once topical and timeless, and to understand literariness itself. A number of essays included in this special issue focus on the notion of the archive, whether viewed as a form of record which remains in abeyance (Jonathan Elmer’s starting point for considering Jefferson’s encounter with the Native American past) or as the place of a misunderstanding, even destructiveness (the point of departure for Herman Rapaport’s reading of Derrida’s Archive Fever). Appropriately, this issue also includes a photo-essay by Laurie Sieverts Snyder, which represents not only a family archive but a collection of memories that inscribe a larger historical displacement and relocation. The intertwined evolution of trauma theory and war neurosis, and the consequent unsexing of trauma, can give rise to a post-Freudian inquiry into the writing of anxiety (such as we see in Lyndsey Stonebridge’s reading of the war novels of Henry Green, where war “is” sex). At the same time, we can glimpse how the belatedness of trauma not only gets recoded as suspension or “falling” but gives rise to a philosophic discourse of trauma (see Eleanor Kaufman’s reading of Perec’s W together with Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience). Given its centrality to contemporary literary-critical readings of trauma, it is not surprising that a number of essays should address Cathy Caruth’s work directly (many of the essays included here also do so indirectly). Her writing remains central to current literary and theoretical discussions of trauma, whether viewed as a phenomenology of trauma (as it is, for instance, by Eleanor Kaufman) or as a vantage point from which to define the modern predicament of mutually entangled histories, communities, and writings (this is how Petar Ramadanovic links Freud’s diasporic movement to the history of slavery and Toni Morrison’s Beloved). [End Page 3]The final section of this special issue returns trauma to the consulting room. Essays on pain (Mary Jacobus on the place of psychoanalysis “between” therapy and hermeneutics as represented by the writings of Wifred Bion) and melancholia (Angelika Rauch’s Kristevan essay on post-traumatic hermeneutics and problems in contemporary trauma therapy) pay particular attention to the question of interpretation in psychoanalysis. They also shift the discussion in the direction of contemporary post... (shrink)