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Publications
President Roth has edited several scholarly books and authored five scholarly volumes:
- Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past (Columbia University Press, 2011)
- Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed, with Clare Lyons and Charles Merewether (Getty Research Institute, 1997),
- The Ironist’s Cage: Trauma, Memory and the Construction of History (Columbia University Press, 1995),
- Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France (Cornell, 1988),
- Psycho-Analysis as History: Negation and Freedom in Freud (Cornell University Press, 1987, 1995)
![[Memory, Trauma and History]](images/memorytraumahistory.jpg)
![[Irresistible Decay]](images/irresistibledecay.jpg)
![[The Ironist’s Cage]](images/ironistscage.jpg)
![[Knowing and History]](images/knowinghistory.jpg)
![[Psycho-Analysis as History]](images/psychoanalyisashistory.jpg)
Michael Roth’s reviews and articles frequently appear in the national media.
“The Castrato and His Wife” by Helen Berry
In 1775, Dorothea Maunsell and her new husband, William Long Kingsman, went to court to show that they were indeed legally married. They had already had two wedding ceremonies (one in Italy, the other in England), but there was a problem: a long, public record of Dorothea already being married to opera singer Ferdinando Tenducci. Those two had eloped in 1766 and had lived as a couple in England and then Italy. But Dorothea and William went to court to argue that the earlier liaison was in fact no real marriage. [ Read More ]
Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past
In these essays, Michael S. Roth uses psychoanalysis to build a richer understanding of history, and then takes a more expansive conception of history to decode the cultural construction of memory. He first examines the development in nineteenth-century France of medical criteria for diagnosing memory disorders, which signal fundamental changes in the understanding of present and past. He next explores links between historical consciousness and issues relating to the psyche, including trauma and repression and hypnosis and therapy. [ Read More ]
Book Review: A look at Diane Arbus and meditations from Errol Morris
Diane Arbus made arresting, absorbing photographs of dwarfs, twins, giants, nudists and carnies. “I really believe,” she said, “there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.” Together with other artists expanding the boundaries of photography in the 1960s, she altered the way we understand portraiture and thus the way we see people. [ Read More ]
Review of Jay Feldman's Manufacturing Hysteria
Manufacturing Hysteria offers a chilling overview of how American political culture has generated domestic enemies to justify massive infringements of rights. [ Read More ]
Book Review: “Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s” by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
“Rebels in Paradise” recounts the story of how adventurous contemporary art developed in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, and how an “art scene” took off in the city during the ’60s. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is especially interested in the “scene” part — of how little-known artists joined together to form a cool cohort, ultimately achieving L.A.’s grand prize: celebrity. [ Read More ]
Tales from College Writing Courses
... In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is chock-full of bonehead tales from the classroom. Some are amusing, but after a while they leave a bad ... [ Read More ]
The Michelangelo Code
... Leonard Barkan's ingenious, lavishly illustrated study focuses on the artist's " life on paper," the hundreds of sheets that have survived ... [ Read More ]
Where Does Genius Come From?
... At the center of Sudden Genius? by Andrew Robinson, are chapters devoted to 10 breakthroughs in the arts and sciences. Unlike Sudden Genius? ... [ Read More ]
Review of Mark C. Taylor's Crisis on Campus
... Taylor's main argument is that our overspecialized colleges and universities are increasingly divorced from the hyper-connected world ... [ Read More ]
Book Review: Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz
Sean Wilentz begins his assessment of Bob Dylan by linking him to the classical American composer Aaron Copland, a signal that this book is not just another biography of the chameleon folkie-rock-star-poet-troubadour. [...] Wilentz has written a book at once deeply felt and historically layered that shows how Dylan's artistic practice is embedded in and responsive to powerful but subtle currents of American culture. [ Read More ]
Book Review: Encounter by Milan Kundera
"Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself?" Milan Kundera asks this question in writing about the painter Francis Bacon, one of many cultural figures he addresses in his commanding, compelling new collection of essays, "Encounter." It's a question that resonates throughout the book. [ Read More ]
Good and Risky: The Promise of a Liberal Education
... The rise of inter-disciplinarity has not diminished the hyper-specialization in the academy, and the resultant pursuit of status through ... [ Read More ]
Book Review: Daring Young Men by Richard Reeves
When we were kids, our aunt told us to "clean our plates, children are starving in Europe." In Europe? Where did she ever get that crazy idea, I wondered. Halfway through Richard Reeves' excellent "Daring Young Men," I learned that all across America in the late 1940s mothers were saying something similar to their children. [ Read More ]
Book Review: The Death of American Virtue by Ken Gormley
When I began reading "The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr," I had the feeling of reliving a bad dream. The sordid and the sanctimonious, the crazy and the corrupt, the hypocrisy of those last years of the Clinton administration and, well, especially the hypocrisy were just awful to recall. [ Read More ]
Book Review: The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand
A slim snapshot of academic conditions on American college campuses from a New Yorker writer. American higher education, we are often told, is the envy of the world. Most of the great research universities are on American soil, and the combination of flexibility and focus offered by U.S. institutions draws talented people from around the world. [ Read More ]
Book Review: A Dream of Undying Fame by Louis Breger
Psychoanalysis has always been a mixed bag, Louis Breger notes. On the one hand, it has produced valuable insights into topics that were previously obscure or even off-limits. On the other, it has generated grand theories that aim to provide universal explanations of human behavior based on little evidence. [ Read More ]
Book Review: Worse Than War by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Daniel Goldhagen wants to get attention and is ready to do whatever it takes. Regardless of one's opinion about the United States' use of atomic weapons in the war against Imperial Japan, that sad event does not bear directly upon the thesis of "Worse Than War." [ Read More ]
Book Review: The Battle for America 2008 by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson
Balz and Johnson call November 2008 the "election of a lifetime." In the face of two wars and a profound global economic crisis, the competition for the presidency was as important as it had been in recent memory. Gone were even the faintest echoes of the Naderite fantasy that it didn't really matter which of the major candidates would be elected. [ Read More ]
Book Review: The American Future by Simon Schama
The French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault insisted that all history is history of the present. When we reimagine the past, we do so with the concerns and hopes of our own time. [ Read More ]
Book Review: The Years of Talking Dangerously by Geoffrey Nunberg
Geoffrey Nunberg's new collection of essays and commentaries explores how we have attempted to combine, divide or dismiss parts of the world simply by talking about them. Nunberg focused on the "end of the Bush era," but he is not limited to the gyrations of political speech. [ Read More ]
Book Review: Annie Leibovitz at Work by Annie Leibovitz
Do we really need another book by Annie Leibovitz? That's what I asked myself as I began reading her newest volume, "Annie Leibovitz at Work." Her pictures are so well known, and she has collected them so many times, in so many different formats. [ Read More ]
Book Review: Carl Djerassi's Four Jews on Parnassus
Four Jews is an audacious book because Djerassi puts words in the mouths of four very well-known cultural figures. In imagining his “geniuses” (and occasionally their wives) conversing on the subjects of fame, marriage and adultery, art, and Jewish identity, he displays an impressive knowledge of their lives and sometimes a keen feel for their intellectual preoccupations. [ Read More ]
Book Review: Call Me Ted by Ted Turner
When employees at CNN or one of the other businesses Ted Turner ran with vision and energy would see him around the shop, he would usually insist: "Call me Ted." Mocking formality, "Call me Ted" was his symbol of openness, but Mr. Turner is anything but open about his thoughts and feelings. [ Read More ]
Book Review: Left in Dark Times by Bernard-Henri Lévy Random
"Left in Dark Times" is a much-abridged translation of a book published last year in France, the original title of which can be roughly translated as "This Big Corpse Flat on Its Back." Lévy sees the left as a corpse, or as a ruin, but rather than writing an account of a drift to conservatism, Lévy offers a polemic explaining why he remains faithful to the core principles of the democratic left. [ Read More ]
Book Review: Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher By Neil Gross
Richard Rorty was the most widely read and influential American philosopher of the past 50 years. Rorty, who died last year, was at the center of language-oriented analytic philosophy when he "redescribed" this intellectual enterprise as a mistaken stage in the history of the discipline. [ Read More ]
Book Review: Standard Operating Procedure by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
Saddam Hussein's prison had been a symbol of torture and abuse, and after the U.S. Army routed the tyrant's forces, American officials set out to remake the prison in our own image. That was the plan: Instead of dungeons and torture, there would be a modern corrections facility, guided by humanitarian values and the rule of law. That was the plan. [ Read More ]
Book Review: The Sixties Unplugged by By Gerard J. DeGroot
Gerard J. DeGroot tells readers that his history of the 1960s, unlike others published in the past decades, is "unplugged." By this he means his story won't be distorted by amplification or enhancements. DeGroot promises a view of the past "unprocessed, natural and raw. ... free of... filters that hide imperfection and distort meaning." [ Read More ]
Book Review: Intimacies by Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips
Post-Freudian thought, especially in the United States, can be divided between those writers (often clinicians) who turn the master's work toward a theory of accommodation of the world and those (often in the humanities) who turn his work toward a critique of the world. [ Read More ]
Book Review: Love Without Pity by Sarah Kofman
Sarah Kofman had something to say, about philosophy, about psychoanalysis, about art, about women. She found her voice in the 1960s, and the language she came to speak was deferred and delivered—articulated—through the lexicon of her generation. It was a time that prized radicalism of thought and often of deed. [ Read More ]
Book Review: The Death of Sigmund Freud by Mark Edmundson
Freud was declared dead in a 2005 cover story in Newsweek; the following year, the magazine ran another piece on the "debunked doctor," declaring him an "inescapable force." Freud just won't disappear, and Mark Edmundson's "The Death of Sigmund Freud" offers a compelling redescription of why the founder of psychoanalysis retains his relevance today. [ Read More ]
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