Shoshana Felman

Shoshana Felman is Woodruff Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Emory University. She was on the faculty of Yale University from 1970 to 2004, where she became Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and Comparative Literature.

She specializes in 19th and 20th century French literature, psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, law and literature. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Grenoble in France in 1970. She has been particularly influential in raising issues connected with Holocaust testimony, and what in her joint work with Dori Laub is called the 'crisis of witnessing'. [See for example [http://www.qualitative-sozialforschung.de/schreiber.htm Birgit Schreiber, "Leaps of faith or "How can we ever talk about the past?"] for an example of the adoption of the term.]

Works

Books
*"The Claims of Literature: The Shoshana Felman Reader", ed. by Emily Sun, Eyal Peretz, Ulrich Baer, Fordham University Press, 2007
*"The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century", Harvard University Press, 2002
* "What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference", Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993
* "Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature Psychoanalysis and History" (co-authored with Dori Laub, M.D.) (1992)
* "Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture" (1987)
* Editor, "Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading–Otherwise" (1982)
* "Le Scandale du corps parlant. Don Juan avec Austin, ou la Séduction en deux langues" (1980), translated as "The Literary Speech Act. Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages" (1984), reissued as "The Scandal of the Speaking Body. Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages" (2002)
* "Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis" (1985), reissued with added materials and interviews (2003)
* "La Folie et la chose littéraire" (1978)
* "La "Folie" dans l'oeuvre romanesque de Stendhal" (1971).

Articles
*"Madness and Philosophy or Literature's Reason" in: "Yale French Studies", No. 52, Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy (1975), pp. 206-228
*"To Open the Question" in: "Yale French Studies", No. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (1977), pp. 5-10
*"Rereading Femininity" in: "Yale French Studies", No. 62, Feminist Readings: French Texts/American Contexts (1981), pp. 19-44
*"Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable" in: "Yale French Studies", No. 63, The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre (1982), pp. 21-44
*"Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis" in: "MLN", Vol. 98, No. 5, Comparative Literature (December 1983), pp. 1021-1053
*"Postal Survival, or the Question of the Navel" in: "Yale French Studies", No. 69, The Lesson of Paul de Man (1985), pp. 49-72
*"Lacan's Psychoanalysis, or The Figure in the Screen", "October", Vol. 45, Summer, 1988, pp. 97-108
*"Benjamin's Silence" in: "Critical Inquiry", Vol. 25, No. 2, "Angelus Novus": Perspectives on Walter Benjamin (Winter 1999), pp. 201-234
*"In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoa", "Yale French Studies", No. 79 (1991), "Literature and the Ethical Question", reprinted in: "Yale French Studies", No. 97, 50 Years of Yale French Studies: A Commemorative Anthology. Part 2: 1980-1998 (2000), pp. 103-150
*"Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust" in: "Critical Inquiry", Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter 2001), pp. 201-238

Notes