This collection brings together essays that reflect on the nature of narrative, literary criticism and history from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from deconstruction, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, to narratology, technology, economics and aesthetics.

This collection brings together essays that reflect on the nature of narrative, literary criticism and history from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from deconstruction, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, to narratology, technology, economics and aesthetics. This book includes responses from renowned scholars across a wide range of disciplines, philosopher Jacques Derrida, the literary critic J. Hillis Miller, W.J.T. Mitchell - well-known for his reflections on the visual world - and Cathy Caruth, one of the founders of the field of trauma theory. These essays are readings of other texts but each becomes itself a narrative performance. What starts out as an exercise in theorizing and reading moves, more often than not, into a meditation on social and political issues crucial for our own sense of ourselves.