The Longing for the Material

karyn ball is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies specializing in literary and critical theory at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. She writes on Critical Theory, cultural studies, and the Holocaust, is the editor of a volume of essays, Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and beyond Psychoanalysis (forthcoming, The Other Press, 2006), and has guest-edited a special issue of Cultural Critique on “Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects” (2000) and an issue of Parallax on the concept of “visceral reason” (2005). Her current project titled The Entropics of Discourse: Climates of Loss in Contemporary Criticism reflects on figures of loss and melancholy in recent cultural theory.