Carolyn J Dean
Biographic Data
| ID | 273785 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Carolyn J Dean |
| GIVEN NAMES | Carolyn J |
| FAMILY NAME | Dean |
| SIGNATURE | DEAN C J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Justice in Lyon: Klaus Barbie and France's First Trial for Crimes against Humanity
Bystanders, Jews, and Historical Interpretation
This article revisits the vast historiography on everyday life in Vichy France to address the moral questions and historical claims implicit in the bystander category. It addresses how historians conceive the relationship between bystanders and Jews, arguing that they implicitly erase the structural violence between the two groups by reproducing the liberal ethics implicit in the slogan "never again" in their own method-and in spite of their comm…
Witnessing: Virtual Conversations
This special feature presents curated excerpts from two virtual conversations that the editors (Liana Chua and Omri Grinberg) held with anthropologist and author Asale Angel-Ajani, historian Carolyn J. Dean and anthropologist and filmmaker Meg McLagan on the theme of witnessing. Beginning with the participants' reflexive discussions of how they came to work on witnessing, the conversations delve into several intertwined questions and debates. The…
A celebrated stone: The Inkas’ carved monolith at Saywiti
First citation in articleGoogle Scholar
Rocks Like Us
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, by Hayden White
Hayden White’s 1973 Metahistory tossed the entire concept of historical science out the window, claiming that historians are fundamentally artists who imbue historical action with aesthetic and ethical purpose. The book urged historians to grapple with whether and how their writing creates rather than reflects reality. It also celebrated the ethics and art of history-writing and diminished historians’ empirical claims. There were two receptions o…
The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject
In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers.
Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust
In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a "surfeit of Jewish memory" is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. Dean explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and West…
The politics of suffering: From the survivor-witness to humanitarian witnessing
This essay engages with the work of the French anthropologist, sociologist and psychiatrist Didier Fassin on the proliferation of the language of trauma and suffering in the late twentieth century. It shows the benefit of taking a long historical view. It describes the fashioning of the ‘survivor-witness’ during the 1961 Eichmann trial and its symbolic connection to the humanitarian witness that emerged in the 1990s. By illustrating the historica…
Mysticism and Mourning in Recent French Thought
There has been a lot of ink spilled lately regarding the various symptoms generated in French intellectual, cultural, and political life by a malady diagnosed as the triumph of neoliberalism and American consumerism at the end of the Cold War. In recent years, some French scholars afflicted with the disease have revisited and revised well-worn political models, and others returned defensively to the tradition of French secular republicanism as an…
From Catastrophe to Hope
In his recent book, Amir Eshel focuses on over thirty recent German-, Hebrew-, and English-language novels to develop a reading method-the "hermeneutics of futurity"-that would replace moralizing approaches to past traumas, including German guilt over the Holocaust and Israeli denial of Palestinian suffering. Futurity demonstrates how various narratives imagine a future liberated from denial, guilt, and thus traumatic repetition. In so doing Eshe…
Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957
Afterword: The Agency of Sex: Volition after Foucault
Michel Foucault's shift to "biopower" away from his earlier conception of power as a form of constraint from which there is no clear path to liberation is the subject of the essays in this issue. In the context of this shift, these essays address from fresh perspectives Foucault's articulation of the "fear" underlying the loss of human autonomy as a political problem, including the ways in which Foucault's efforts to theorize resistance and the r…
A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock
A major contribution to both art history and Latin American studies, A Culture of Stone offers sophisticated new insights into Inka culture and the interpretation of non-Western art. Carolyn Dean focuses on rock outcrops masterfully integrated into Inka architecture, exquisitely worked masonry, and freestanding sacred rocks, explaining how certain stones took on lives of their own and played a vital role in the unfolding of Inka history. Examinin…
Minimalism and Victim Testimony
This essay renews a discussion of how historians do, and should, represent atrocity. It argues that the problems of representing extreme violence remain under-conceptualized; in this context it discusses the strengths and weaknesses of minimalism, a style prevalent both in historiography and in an intellectual culture that values understatement in approaches to violence. The essay traces the general cultural preference for minimalist narratives o…
Against Grandiloquence
Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History. By Berel Lang
The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust
When we are confronted with images of and memoirs from the Holocaust and subsequent cases of vast cruelty and suffering, is our impulse to empathize put at risk by the possibility of becoming numb to horror? Carolyn J. Dean's provocative new book addresses the ways we evade our failures of empathy in the face of massive suffering: Has exposure (or overexposure) to representations of pain damaged our ability to feel? Do the frequent claims that ar…
Intellectual History and the Prominence of 'Things That Matter
This essay analyses the relationship between Dominick LaCapra and the 'historians'--primarily historians of the Holocaust--in order to understand why his approach inspires hostility or worse, negligence of the insights into the history of traumatic events his work provides. It seeks therefore to understand not only how LaCapra's work is 'history' rather than simply 'historiographical criticism', but also how it sheds light on how 'history' define…
History writing, numbness, and the restoration of dignity
This article investigates how historians have sought to foster empathic identification with victims in various narratives on the genocide of European Jewry. It takes historians’ extreme reactions to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executionersas a point of departure, and argues that most historical narratives fail to address how graphic writing about atrocities generates identification with both perpetrators and victims. The essay then …
Empathy, Pornography, and Suffering
carolyn j. dean is Professor of History at Brown University. She is currently working on a study tentatively entitled "Empathy,Suffering, and Indifference after the Holocaust
History and Holocaust Representation
Books reviewed in this article:Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation
The Frail Social BodyPornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France
Amid the national shame and subjugation following World War I in France, cultural critics there—journalists, novelists, doctors, and legislators, among others—worked to rehabilitate what was perceived as an unhealthy social body. This book shows how these critics attempted to reconstruct the “bodily integrity” of the nation by pointing to the dangers of homosexuality and pornography. It demonstrates the importance of this concept of bodily integr…
The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968
Christine Bard (sous la dir. de), Un Siècle d'antiféminisme, Paris, Fayard, 1999, 481 p
Un Siecle d'antifeminisme est l'un des premiers travaux universitaires s'attachant a definir l'antifeminisme et a en retracer l'historique en France au cours des cent dernieres annees. Son interet repose sur l'eventail et la variete des contributions reunies par Christine Bard autour de trois axes : « De la fin du XIXe siecle aux annees folles », « Des annees 1930 au baby boom » et « Du MLF a nos jours ». Il rend compte non seulement de la verita…
Christine Bard, Les Garçonnes. Modes et fantasmes des Années folles, Paris, Flammarion, 1998, 159 p
Christine Bard, avec Les Garçonnes, propose un fougueux antidote à la remarquable capacité du patriarcat à convertir la rébellion féminine en un reflet de son propre désir ou anxiété. Dans une analyse extrêmement précise de la garçonne, l'auteur montre combien cette figure est essentiellement une métaphore de la dissolution des mœurs. La garçonne rejette la féminité traditionnelle, s'attirant la colère de ceux qu'inquiète la dépopulation. Son cor…
A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock
A major contribution to both art history and Latin American studies, A Culture of Stone offers sophisticated new insights into Inka culture and the interpretation of non-Western art. Carolyn Dean focuses on rock outcrops masterfully integrated into Inka architecture, exquisitely worked masonry, and freestanding sacred rocks, explaining how certain stones took on lives of their own and played a vital role in the unfolding of Inka history. Examinin…
The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies.Anthony Giddens
Empathy, Pornography, and Suffering
carolyn j. dean is Professor of History at Brown University. She is currently working on a study tentatively entitled "Empathy,Suffering, and Indifference after the Holocaust
The Productive Hypothesis: Foucault, Gender, and the History of Sexuality
Dans le cadre d'une etude sur l'histoire de la sexualite faite par Foucault, l'A. presente les travaux theoriques et historiques effectues sur le sujet depuis lui. Puis il soutient que l'oeuvre de Foucault est le produit de crises dans la subjectivite masculine, prenant leur origine dans la Grande Guerre. Ainsi, l'A. cherche a expliquer l'absence de genre comme une categorie d'analyse de son travail, tout autant que son incapacite a rendre compte…
Law and Sacrifice: Bataille, Lacan, and the Critique of the Subject
Ilfaut se ranger a lavis de Flesch et exiger que la societW, si elle continue a condamner a mort, a tout le moins essaie d'utiliser la sanction capitale egalement a des fins de recherche et de prophylaxie. Si l'on enheve a une famille un de ses membres a qui on separe, a titre de punition, la tWe du tronc, il est d'une sentimentalite peu adequate de reconnaitre a cette famille comme un droit sacre celui de disposer des deux tronfons: le cerveau d…
A celebrated stone: The Inkas’ carved monolith at Saywiti
First citation in articleGoogle Scholar
The politics of suffering: From the survivor-witness to humanitarian witnessing
This essay engages with the work of the French anthropologist, sociologist and psychiatrist Didier Fassin on the proliferation of the language of trauma and suffering in the late twentieth century. It shows the benefit of taking a long historical view. It describes the fashioning of the ‘survivor-witness’ during the 1961 Eichmann trial and its symbolic connection to the humanitarian witness that emerged in the 1990s. By illustrating the historica…
Afterword: The Agency of Sex: Volition after Foucault
Michel Foucault's shift to "biopower" away from his earlier conception of power as a form of constraint from which there is no clear path to liberation is the subject of the essays in this issue. In the context of this shift, these essays address from fresh perspectives Foucault's articulation of the "fear" underlying the loss of human autonomy as a political problem, including the ways in which Foucault's efforts to theorize resistance and the r…
Minimalism and Victim Testimony
This essay renews a discussion of how historians do, and should, represent atrocity. It argues that the problems of representing extreme violence remain under-conceptualized; in this context it discusses the strengths and weaknesses of minimalism, a style prevalent both in historiography and in an intellectual culture that values understatement in approaches to violence. The essay traces the general cultural preference for minimalist narratives o…
History writing, numbness, and the restoration of dignity
This article investigates how historians have sought to foster empathic identification with victims in various narratives on the genocide of European Jewry. It takes historians’ extreme reactions to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executionersas a point of departure, and argues that most historical narratives fail to address how graphic writing about atrocities generates identification with both perpetrators and victims. The essay then …
Law and Sacrifice: Bataille, Lacan, and the Critique of the Subject
Ilfaut se ranger a lavis de Flesch et exiger que la societW, si elle continue a condamner a mort, a tout le moins essaie d'utiliser la sanction capitale egalement a des fins de recherche et de prophylaxie. Si l'on enheve a une famille un de ses membres a qui on separe, a titre de punition, la tWe du tronc, il est d'une sentimentalite peu adequate de reconnaitre a cette famille comme un droit sacre celui de disposer des deux tronfons: le cerveau d…
The Self and Its Pleasures
Poli tiques de l'écriture: Bataille/Derrida: Le Sens du sacré dans la pensée fram;aise du surréalisme a nos jours ¡Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard ¡Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 3, 9-58.Pefanis warns us to resist calling Bataille a poststructuralist or postmodernist "in order to avoid the easy retrospective projection of Batai…
Pornography, Literature, and the Redemption of Virility in France, 1880-1930
Research Article| July 01 1993 Pornography, Literature, and the Redemption of Virility in France, 1880-1930 Carolyn Dean Carolyn Dean Carolyn Dean is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. She is the author of The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). She is currently working on a short book entitled Sexuality and Modern Culture to be published by …
The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies.Anthony Giddens
The Productive Hypothesis: Foucault, Gender, and the History of Sexuality
Dans le cadre d'une etude sur l'histoire de la sexualite faite par Foucault, l'A. presente les travaux theoriques et historiques effectues sur le sujet depuis lui. Puis il soutient que l'oeuvre de Foucault est le produit de crises dans la subjectivite masculine, prenant leur origine dans la Grande Guerre. Ainsi, l'A. cherche a expliquer l'absence de genre comme une categorie d'analyse de son travail, tout autant que son incapacite a rendre compte…
The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy
ForewordIntroduction3Pt. 1The Enchantment of AppearancesCh. IFashion and the West: The Aristocratic Moment18Ch. IIA Century of Fashion55Ch. IIIOpen Fashion88Pt. 2Consummate FashionCh. IVThe Seduction of Things134Ch. VAdvertising on the Offensive156Ch. VICulture, Media Style174Ch. VIIMeaning Carries On203Ch. VIIIThe Progressive Shifting of the Social226Epilogue242Notes253Works Cited265Index271
Claude Cahun's Double
Cette approche de l'oeuvre de Claude Cahun, ecrivain-photographe de debut du XX e siecle lie au surrealisme, souligne la maniere dont son oeuvre theorise le lesbianisme comme site premier de la resistance a l'heterosexualite consideree comme pratique normative. L'A. montre de plus que l'homosexualite represente dans l'oeuvre de Cahun la mise en scene de la mobilite du sujet. Pourtant, l'homosexualite et ses productions legitiment et destabilisent…
Homosexuality in Modern France
This volume explores the realities and representations of same-sex sexuality in France in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the period that witnessed the emergence of in the modern sense of the word. Based on archival research and textual analysis, the articles examine the development of homosexual subcultures and illustrate the ways in which philosophes, pamphleteers, police, novelists, scientists, and politicians conceptualiz…
Christine Bard, Les Garçonnes. Modes et fantasmes des Années folles, Paris, Flammarion, 1998, 159 p
Christine Bard, avec Les Garçonnes, propose un fougueux antidote à la remarquable capacité du patriarcat à convertir la rébellion féminine en un reflet de son propre désir ou anxiété. Dans une analyse extrêmement précise de la garçonne, l'auteur montre combien cette figure est essentiellement une métaphore de la dissolution des mœurs. La garçonne rejette la féminité traditionnelle, s'attirant la colère de ceux qu'inquiète la dépopulation. Son cor…
Queer History
Book reviewed in this article: Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference . By Scott Bravmann
The Frail Social BodyPornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Fantasies in Interwar France
Amid the national shame and subjugation following World War I in France, cultural critics there—journalists, novelists, doctors, and legislators, among others—worked to rehabilitate what was perceived as an unhealthy social body. This book shows how these critics attempted to reconstruct the “bodily integrity” of the nation by pointing to the dangers of homosexuality and pornography. It demonstrates the importance of this concept of bodily integr…
The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968
Christine Bard (sous la dir. de), Un Siècle d'antiféminisme, Paris, Fayard, 1999, 481 p
Un Siecle d'antifeminisme est l'un des premiers travaux universitaires s'attachant a definir l'antifeminisme et a en retracer l'historique en France au cours des cent dernieres annees. Son interet repose sur l'eventail et la variete des contributions reunies par Christine Bard autour de trois axes : « De la fin du XIXe siecle aux annees folles », « Des annees 1930 au baby boom » et « Du MLF a nos jours ». Il rend compte non seulement de la verita…
History and Holocaust Representation
Books reviewed in this article:Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation
Empathy, Pornography, and Suffering
carolyn j. dean is Professor of History at Brown University. She is currently working on a study tentatively entitled "Empathy,Suffering, and Indifference after the Holocaust
The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust
When we are confronted with images of and memoirs from the Holocaust and subsequent cases of vast cruelty and suffering, is our impulse to empathize put at risk by the possibility of becoming numb to horror? Carolyn J. Dean's provocative new book addresses the ways we evade our failures of empathy in the face of massive suffering: Has exposure (or overexposure) to representations of pain damaged our ability to feel? Do the frequent claims that ar…
Intellectual History and the Prominence of 'Things That Matter
This essay analyses the relationship between Dominick LaCapra and the 'historians'--primarily historians of the Holocaust--in order to understand why his approach inspires hostility or worse, negligence of the insights into the history of traumatic events his work provides. It seeks therefore to understand not only how LaCapra's work is 'history' rather than simply 'historiographical criticism', but also how it sheds light on how 'history' define…
History writing, numbness, and the restoration of dignity
This article investigates how historians have sought to foster empathic identification with victims in various narratives on the genocide of European Jewry. It takes historians’ extreme reactions to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executionersas a point of departure, and argues that most historical narratives fail to address how graphic writing about atrocities generates identification with both perpetrators and victims. The essay then …
Against Grandiloquence
Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History. By Berel Lang
A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock
A major contribution to both art history and Latin American studies, A Culture of Stone offers sophisticated new insights into Inka culture and the interpretation of non-Western art. Carolyn Dean focuses on rock outcrops masterfully integrated into Inka architecture, exquisitely worked masonry, and freestanding sacred rocks, explaining how certain stones took on lives of their own and played a vital role in the unfolding of Inka history. Examinin…
Minimalism and Victim Testimony
This essay renews a discussion of how historians do, and should, represent atrocity. It argues that the problems of representing extreme violence remain under-conceptualized; in this context it discusses the strengths and weaknesses of minimalism, a style prevalent both in historiography and in an intellectual culture that values understatement in approaches to violence. The essay traces the general cultural preference for minimalist narratives o…
Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957
Afterword: The Agency of Sex: Volition after Foucault
Michel Foucault's shift to "biopower" away from his earlier conception of power as a form of constraint from which there is no clear path to liberation is the subject of the essays in this issue. In the context of this shift, these essays address from fresh perspectives Foucault's articulation of the "fear" underlying the loss of human autonomy as a political problem, including the ways in which Foucault's efforts to theorize resistance and the r…
Mysticism and Mourning in Recent French Thought
There has been a lot of ink spilled lately regarding the various symptoms generated in French intellectual, cultural, and political life by a malady diagnosed as the triumph of neoliberalism and American consumerism at the end of the Cold War. In recent years, some French scholars afflicted with the disease have revisited and revised well-worn political models, and others returned defensively to the tradition of French secular republicanism as an…
From Catastrophe to Hope
In his recent book, Amir Eshel focuses on over thirty recent German-, Hebrew-, and English-language novels to develop a reading method-the "hermeneutics of futurity"-that would replace moralizing approaches to past traumas, including German guilt over the Holocaust and Israeli denial of Palestinian suffering. Futurity demonstrates how various narratives imagine a future liberated from denial, guilt, and thus traumatic repetition. In so doing Eshe…
Art (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · History (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works)