front cover of Imprint and Trace
Imprint and Trace
Handwriting in the Age of Technology
Sonja Neef
Reaktion Books, 2011

Today, writing by hand seems a nearly archaic process. Nearly all of our written communication is digital—our letters are via email or text message, our manuscripts are composed using word processors, our journals are blogs, and we sign checks to pay bills with the push of a button. Sonja Neef believes that what we have lost in our modern technological conversation is the ductus—the physical and material act of handwriting.

            In Imprint and Trace Neef argues, however, that handwriting throughout its history has always been threatened with erasure. It exists in a dual state: able to be standardized, repeated, copied—much like an imprint—and yet persistently singular, original, and authentic as a trace or line. Throughout its history, from the first prehistoric handprint, through the innovations of stylus, quill, and printing press, handwriting has revealed an interweaving, ever-changing relationship between imprint and trace. Even today, in the age of the digital revolution, the trace of handwriting is still an integral part of communication, whether etched, photographed, pixelated, or scanned.

            Imprint and Trace presents an essential re-evaluation of the relationships between handwriting and technology, and between the various imprints and traces that define communication.

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front cover of Photography, Trace, and Trauma
Photography, Trace, and Trauma
Margaret Iversen
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Photography is often associated with the psychic effects of trauma: the automatic nature of the process, wide-open camera lens, and light-sensitive film record chance details unnoticed by the photographer—similar to what happens when a traumatic event bypasses consciousness and lodges deeply in the unconscious mind. Photography, Trace, and Trauma takes a groundbreaking look at photographic art and works in other media that explore this important analogy.

Examining photography and film, molds, rubbings, and more, Margaret Iversen considers how these artistic processes can be understood as presenting or simulating a residue, trace, or “index” of a traumatic event. These approaches, which involve close physical contact or the short-circuiting of artistic agency, are favored by artists who wish to convey the disorienting effect and elusive character of trauma. Informing the work of a number of contemporary artists—including Tacita Dean, Jasper Johns, Mary Kelly, Gabriel Orozco, and Gerhard Richter—the concept of the trace is shown to be vital for any account of the aesthetics of trauma; it has left an indelible mark on the history of photography and art as a whole.
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Toward a Sociology of the Trace
Herman Gray
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Using culture as an entry point, and informed by the work of contemporary social theorists, the essays in this volume identify and challenge sites where the representational dimension of social life produces national identity through scripts of belonging, or traces.

The contributors utilize empirically based studies of social policy, political economy, and social institutions to offer a new way of looking at the creation of meaning, representation, and memory. They scrutinize subjects such as narratives in the U.S. coal industry's change from digging mines to removing mountaintops; war-related redress policies in post-World War II Japan; views of masculinity linked to tequila, Pancho Villa, and the Mexican Revolution; and the politics of subjectivity in 1970s political violence in Thailand.

Contributors: Sarah Banet-Weiser, U of Southern California; Barbara A. Barnes, U of California, Berkeley; Marie Sarita Gaytán; Avery F. Gordon, U of California, Santa Barbara; Tanya McNeill, U of California, Santa Cruz; Sudarat Musikawong, Willamette U; Akiko Naono, U of Kyushu; Rebecca R. Scott, U of Missouri.
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front cover of The Trace of Judaism
The Trace of Judaism
Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas
Val Vinokur
Northwestern University Press, 2009
Recipient, 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship

The defining quality of Russian literature, for most critics, is its ethical seriousness expressed through formal originality. The Trace of Judaism addresses this characteristic through the thought of the Lithuanian-born Franco-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Steeped in the Russian classics from an early age, Levinas drew significantly from Dostoevsky in his ethical thought. One can profitably read Russian literature through Levinas, and vice versa.
 
Vinokur links new readings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Isaac Babel, and Osip Mandelstam to the work of Levinas, to ask: How does Judaism haunt Russian literature? In what ways is Levinas' ethics as "Russian" as it is arguably "Jewish"? And more broadly, how do ethics and aesthetics inflect each other? Vinokur considers how the encounter with the other invokes responsibilities ethical and aesthetic, and shows how the volatile relationship between ethics and aesthetics--much like the connection between the Russian and Jewish traditions--may be inextricably symbiotic. In an ambitious work that illuminates the writings of all of these authors, Vinokur pursues the implications of this reading for our understanding of the function of literature--its unique status as a sphere in which an ethical vision such as that of Levinas becomes comprehensible.
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front cover of Trace of One
Trace of One
Joanna Goodman
University of Iowa Press, 2002

In Trace of One,real geographies merge with spiritual ones, just as details of the speaker’s physical and emotional worlds intertwine with the transcendent realms of science, religion, and myth. Joanna Goodman’s poems share a sense of spatial and temporal displacement—they are love poems to a place, whether it be a field, a room, or a paradise—they celebrate their subjects, but they are also poems of grief and solitude. The poems resonate with ethereal echoes paradoxically emitted by an increasingly demystified world in which mechanical explanations for the workings of the human mind and body bump up against the mystery and obliqueness of the soul.

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