Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative

Walter A. Davis

feb 2001 · State University of New York Press

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Through a critique of history—as a reality, a discipline, and a way of writing—Deracination challenges the basic theoretical tenets of both humanism and postmodernism. As a discipline, history is currently undergoing what Heidegger would call a productive "crisis," and a number of thinkers, including Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and Stephen Greenblatt, have begun to reexamine the cognitive assumptions and narrative paradigms that inform the discipline. This book radicalizes such developments in order to construct both a new theory of history as well as a new concept of how histories should be written. To make the interrogation concrete, the book focuses on Hiroshima and the ways in which the trauma of that event has been repressed by the discourses that historians have fashioned in order to "explain" what happened on August 6, 1945.

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Walter A. Davis is Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is the author of several books, including Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience and Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud. He recently published the companion piece to the present volume: The Holocaust Memorial: A Play about Hiroshima.