John Zilcosky publishes new book!

The Language of Trauma: War and Technology in Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka

“For about a century, psychoanalysis has been telling us that ‘the uncanny’ is an effect of infantile castration anxiety. And for about half a century, deconstruction has been claiming that it is the mirror hall of literature’s inherent self-reflexivity that produces the uncanny. By tracing the roots of this term in the battles of nineteenth- and twentieth-century mobile and industrialized warfare, John Zilcosky puts the uncanny and its corollary, ‘trauma,’ back on their historical feet.”

Wolf Kittler, Professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies and Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara