Trauma studies, an area of cultural investigation that came to prominence in the early-to-mid-1990s, prides itself on its explicit commitment to ethics, which sets it apart from the poststructuralist criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s in which it has its roots. Standing accused of irrelevance or indifference to "real-world" issues such as history, politics, and ethics because of its predominantly epistemological focus, this earlier, "textualist" paradigm was largely eclipsed around the mid-1980s by overtly historicist or culturalist approaches, including new historicism, cultural materialism, cultural studies, and various types of advocacy criticism (feminist, lesbian and gay, Marxist, and postcolonial). Trauma studies can with some justifi cation be regarded as the reinvention in an ethical guise of this much maligned textualism.Cathy Caruth, one of the leading fi gures in trauma studies (along with Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey Hartman, and Dominick LaCapra), counters the oft-heard critique of poststructuralism outlined above by arguing that, rather than leading us away from history and into "political and ethical paralysis" (Unclaimed 10), a textualist approach can afford us unique access to history. Indeed, it makes possible a "rethinking of reference," which aims not at "eliminating history" but at "resituating it in our understanding, that is, at permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not" (11). By bringing the insights of deconstructive and psychoanalytic scholarship to the analysis of cultural artifacts that bear witness to traumatic histories, critics can gain access to extreme events and experiences that defy understanding and representation. Caruth insists on the ethical signifi cance of this critical practice. She claims that "the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demand" a "new mode of reading and of listening" (9) that would allow us to pass out of the isolation imposed