Dartmouth Events

April 28, 2026
Rockefeller 001
4:30 pm
Free and open to the public.
Cathy Caruth, Cornell University

Falling Stories

      This talk takes as its starting point the retelling of the story of humankind’s Fall in Milton’s Paradise Lost and focuses on Eve’s dream of falling at its center. Reflecting on the entanglement of Satanic and human stories in this dream and its larger relation to the poem, I ask: what does it mean to tell the story of a fall, who can tell it, and whose story is it? Why do the Biblical story and its theological and philological refigurings first meet in a dream? How does this dream of falling reflect on the larger tradition of the Fall? And what does the entanglement of dreaming, falling and waking in Eve’s dream suggest about the narrative and philosophical questions raised by falling stories?

Cathy Caruth is Class of 1916 Professor at Cornell University and teaches in Comparative Literature and Literatures in English. Her books include, among others,Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History; and Literature in the Ashes of History. She has also edited multiple collections, including Trauma: Explorations in Memory and Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience. She helped create the “NIA Project” Archive with her Dr. Nadine Kaslow (a collection of interviews with battered women in Atlanta), and with Professor Laurent Dubreuil has established the “Ape Testimony Archive” at Cornell (a series of interviews with scientists and others who have worked and lived with bonobos and chimps); she is currently involved in an experimental project on language, art and testimony in bonobos. The lecture today is the second in a series on Eve’s Dream in Paradise Lost.