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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 justification be regarded as the reinvention in an ethical guise of this much maligned textualism. Cathy Caruth, one of the leading figures in trauma studies (along with Shoshana Felman, Geoffrey …