Trauma and Cinema – Cross–Cultural Explorations

E. Ann Kaplan is professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Humanities Institute at the Stony Brook University. She is the author of many books and articles, including several on feminism and film. Ban Wang is a professor of Asian Studies at Rutgers University and the author of The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 1997).

This path-finding volume makes good on the promise implicit in its title: it describes a range of new cinematic and visual forms that have emerged in the context of historical trauma in a variety of national settings, and it strives to define the specific styles that can best come to grips with events that are sometimes considered unrepresentable. The careful analysis of individual texts and the informed and reflective commentary on theories of trauma and modes of representation will have a major impact on emerging scholarship. -- Robert J. Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History