To read this review (In French): https://cjs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cjs/article/view/40227/36407
Category: Review
“Levitt’s careful attention to the scenes of her own trauma do not reveal her ‘self’ to us, her readers, however. Instead, her words initiate a harmonic resonance between the objects in (and of) her traumatic memory and the objects in (and of) other traumas, other experiences, and other wounded sites of memory and loss. In writing toward these resonances, Levitt herself is both in the story and on the banks of its flow, both the object (subject) of reflection–as in a confession–but also able to step outside the flow of the story by showing up the process of thinking and writing.” (M. Gail Hamner)
Read the full review essay: https://affecognitive.wordpress.com/2021/02/22/laura-levitt-the-objects-that-remain/?fbclid=IwAR2n812JjxHnE8UH0ufmYq8Tle_USD6xdgSys0Qt5nlVOwEyoN0X3Der3Wc
Professor Laura Levitt reflects on her life through the objects that remain after a deeply personal and violent trauma in her new work of literary nonfiction.
Laura Levitt’s expertise is in American Jewish life, gender, memory, the Holocaust, trauma and vistual culture. In her new work of literary nonfiction, the professor of religion, Jewish studies and gender, examines her search for acknowledgment, connection and justice after being raped in 1989.
Levitt’s deeply personal book tells the story of her trauma through the objects that bore witness to that crime and, in doing so, provides a new framework for catharsis.
Temple Now interviewed Levitt about The Objects That Remain.
Read this Interview Review from Temple Now:
https://news.temple.edu/2020-12-09/cla-professor-new-book-objects-remain-explores-life-after-loss
Levitt’s surprising, analogous approach combines art, photography, history, Bible verses, and literary influences to try and understand the holes left by a crime. By revealing doubts and her own rethinking over time, the book lays bare the process of its own making. The Objects That Remain fuses passionate research with piercing inquiry, finding peace within ambiguity.
Karen Rigby, Foreword Reviews