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Richard Powers's The Echo Maker And The Trauma Of Survival, Nicolas J. Potkalitsky

ETD Archive

In this study, Cathy Caruth's innovative description of trauma as a crisis of survival in works such as "Traumatic Departures: Survival and History in Freud" and Unclaimed Experience (1996) is applied to the story of Mark Schluter's traumatic experience in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker (2006). Theoretically, Caruth's description owes much to Freud's classic accounts of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Moses and Monotheism (1939). In particular, Caruth capitalizes in on Freud's reference to the experience of awakening from traumatic unconsciousness as an "another fright" in the second section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 11). For …