ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to account for the emergence of trauma theory as a humanistic field of inquiry by tracing its roots to long-standing debates about the ethics and aesthetics of representing the Holocaust and a paradigm shift in literary studies that created favourable conditions for an interest in trauma to blossom. The work of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, together with that of Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman, laid the foundations of literary trauma theory. The chapter describes their work historically by relating it to the writings of Theodor Adorno, Wulf Kansteiner, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-François Lyotard from the early postwar period on the ethics and aesthetics of Holocaust representation. It shows how trauma theory emerged more immediately in response to a paradigm shift in literary studies that saw deconstruction superseded by movements or schools allegedly more attuned to the realities of history and politics in the course of the 1980s.
