Acts of Narrative

This collection brings together essays that reflect on the nature of narrative, literary criticism and history from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from deconstruction, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, to narratology, technology, economics and aesthetics. This book includes responses from renowned scholars across a wide range of disciplines, philosopher Jacques Derrida, the literary critic J. Hillis Miller, W.J.T. Mitchell - well-known for his reflections on the visual world - and Cathy Caruth, one of the founders of the field of trauma theory. These essays are readings of other texts but each becomes itself a narrative performance. What starts out as an exercise in theorizing and reading moves, more often than not, into a meditation on social and political issues crucial for our own sense of ourselves.