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Buelens, Gert; Durrant, Sam; Eaglestone, Robert (eds.). The Future of Trauma Theory. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. New York: Routledge, 2014. 181 pp.

In The Trauma Question, Roger Luckhurst’s comprehensive historical analysis shows that “trauma” as we know it today is a social construction. Of course, modern medical use of the term is only about a century old, and official diagnoses of posttraumatic stress disorder have been made for only three decades. But Luckhurst argues that the very concept of trauma – the idea that the fabric of everyday habitus and selfhood can be violently altered by an external event – is inextricably bound up with the machinations of modernity, including relative rises in quality of life coinciding with improved destructive technology and a cultural orientation towards probabilistic risk assessment. As Jeffrey Alexander demonstrates, collective traumas are perhaps no less constructed. Influential “carrier groups” compete with one another to draw public attention to the sufferings of particular individuals; they frame this suffering in particular ways, and experience various levels of success in these campaigns. This is why the narrative of the Holocaust has changed over time (from plot element in a progressive vanquishing of Nazi barbarism, to “ur-trauma” encapsulating the evil potentialities of rationalization), and why the Holocaust receives so much more recognition than the “Rape of Nanjing,” the two-month period during