Abstract
Initially published in 1996, Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History has been reprinted as a twentieth-anniversary edition and remains a remarkable text for reading trauma. This new edition offers Caruth's original publication plus an afterword in which she addresses some of the criticism her treatise on trauma has received over the last two decades. When Unclaimed Experience was first published, "trauma studies" was not a formally declared field. In the mid-1990s, research on trauma was pursued in clinical areas such as psychology and neurobiology, and marginally by Holocaust studies. Caruth's text was one of the first to shape this now recognized field, along with the scholarship of Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Geoffrey Hartman, among others. However, in her newly added endnotes, Caruth resists the designation of "trauma studies" and claims the phrasing "has the disadvantage of codifying the term 'trauma' and eliminating some of its surprise and literariness" (174).