Ethics Of Witness In Global Testimonial Narratives

Author : Kimberly A. Nance
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 159 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2019-12-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781498598897

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Ethics of Witness in Global Testimonial Narratives by Kimberly A. Nance Pdf

Inspired by Susan Sontag’s examination of the impact of “photography of conscience” in Regarding the Pain of Others, Kimberly A. Nance’s Responding to the Pain of Others: Ethics of Witness in Global Testimonial Narratives takes as its point of departure Sontag’s speculation that in combatting human rights abuse, “a narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image.” Building on her own earlier research on Aristotelian rhetorical theory and testimony, along with other interdisciplinary approaches, Nance analyzes the socio-literary narratives of Elvia Alvarado, Medea Benjamin, Peter Dickinson, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Clea Koff, Delia Jarrett-Macauley, Valentino Achak Deng, Dave Eggers, Uwem Akpan, and Alicia Partnoy. Each of them, she finds, confronts a human rights discourse in which words—and witnesses—have become disconnected from actions. Recognizing that the genre’s own conventions have become an obstacle to its projects, these testimonialists draw on humor, irony, satire, parody, and innovative literary techniques, alongside strategies rooted in real-life organizing, in an effort to reactivate the discourse of human rights. They seek to persuade readers to exchange a solidarity of sentiment, a state Michael Vander Weele calls “an aesthetics in which the engine revs but the clutch is never engaged,” for actual social action.

Author : Stella Setka
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 175 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2020-05-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781498583848

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Empathy and the Phantasmic in Ethnic American Trauma Narratives by Stella Setka Pdf

Empathy and the Phantasmic in Ethnic American Trauma Narratives examines a burgeoning genre of ethnic American literature called phantasmic trauma narratives, which use culturally specific modes of the supernatural to connect readers to historical traumas such as slavery and genocide. Drawing on trauma theory and using an ethnic studies methodology, this book shows how phantasmic novels and films present historical trauma in ways that seek to invite reader/viewer empathy about the cultural groups represented. In so doing, the author argues that these texts also provide models of interracial alliances to encourage contemporary cross-cultural engagement as a restorative response to historical traumas. Further, the author examines how these narratives function as sites of cultural memory that provide a critical purchase on the enormity of enslavement, genocide, and dispossession.

Author : Elzbieta Janicka,Tomasz Zukowski
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2021-07-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781793636706

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Philo-Semitic Violence by Elzbieta Janicka,Tomasz Zukowski Pdf

Philo-Semitic Violence: Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives addresses the growing popularity of philo-Semitic violence in Poland between the 2000 revelation of Polish participation in the Holocaust and the 2015 authoritarian turn. Elżbieta Janicka and Tomasz Żukowski examine phenomena termed a “new opening in Polish-Jewish relations,” thought to stem from sociocultural change and the posthumous inclusion of those subjected to anti-Semitic violence. The authors investigate the terms and conditions of this inclusion whose object is an imagined collective Jewish figure. Different creators and media, same friendly intentions, same warm reception beyond class and political cleavages, regardless of gender and age. The made-to-measure Jewish figure confirms and legitimizes the majority narrative—especially about Polish stances and behaviors during the Holocaust. Enabled by this, philo-Semitic feelings indulge the dominant group in Baudrillard’s retrospective hallucinations. The consequence: aggression toward anyone who dares to interrupt the narcissistic self-staging. This book exposes the Polish ethnoreligious identity regime that privileges the concern for the collective image over reality. The authors’ inquiry shows how patterns of exclusion and violence are reproduced when anti-Semitism—with its Christian sources and community-building function—is not openly problematized, reassessed, and rejected in light of its consequences and the basic principle of equal rights.

Author : Danel Olson
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2021-09-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781793638335

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9/11 Gothic by Danel Olson Pdf

Published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, 9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels returns to the ruins and anguish of 9/11 to pose a question not yet addressed by scholarship. Two time World Fantasy Award-winning writer Danel Olson asks how, why, and where New York City novels capture the terror of the Al-Qaeda mass murders through a supernatural lens. This book explores ghostly presences from the world’s largest crime scene in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Griffin Hansbury, and Patrick McGrath—all of whom have been called writers of Gotham. Arguing how theories on trauma and the Gothic can combine to explain ghostly encounters civilian survivors experience in fiction, Olson shares what those eerie meetings express about grief, guilt, love, memory, sex, and suicidal urges. This book also explores why and how paths to recovery open for these ghost-visited survivors in the fiction of catastrophe from the early twenty-first century.

Author : Toshiaki Komura
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2020-10-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781793612632

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Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry by Toshiaki Komura Pdf

Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry: Tracing Inaccessible Grief from Stevens to Post-9/11 examines contemporary literary expressions of losses that are “lost” on us, inquiring what it means to “lose” loss and what happens when dispossessory experiences go unacknowledged or become inaccessible. Toshiaki Komura analyzes a range of elegiac poetry that does not neatly align with conventional assumptions about the genre, including Wallace Stevens’s “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” Sylvia Plath’s last poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III, Sharon Olds’s The Dead and the Living, Louise Glück’s Averno, and poems written after 9/11. What these poems reveal at the intersection of personal and communal mourning are the mechanism of cognitive myth-making involved in denied grief and its social and ethical implications. Engaging with an assortment of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and psychological theories, Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry elucidates how poetry gives shape to the vague despondency of unrecognized loss and what kind of phantomic effects these equivocal grieving experiences may create.

Author : Ross J. Wilson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2021-10-20
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781000463293

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Museums and the Act of Witnessing by Ross J. Wilson Pdf

Museums and the Act of Witnessing examines how representations of traumatic histories and the legacies of the twentieth century in museums and heritage sites across the world shape political, social and cultural identities. Drawing on an interdisciplinary analysis of a variety of museum exhibitions around the globe, the book demonstrates how the narrative of ‘witnessing’ has shaped representation of war, genocide, repression and violence. Revealing that this form of presentation is inherently Western in its origins and nature, Wilson goes on to argue that witnessing the past is to colonise the future, as we project a certain view of the events of the past onto the present. Detailing the character, content and meanings of representation that focus on the traumatic events of the twentieth century, the book demonstrates the way in which visitors are cast as ‘witnesses’ and questions what the true purpose of witnessing really is. Museums and the Act of Witnessing draws attention to the fact that we have inherited a distinct, and often limited, mode of seeing the past and considers how we can more effectively engage with the past in the present. The book will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, history, sociology, conflict, politics and memory.

Author : Gillian Whitlock
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2015-04-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780191054235

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Postcolonial Life Narratives by Gillian Whitlock Pdf

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. Postcolonial Life Narrative draws together two dynamic fields of contemporary literature and criticism, postcolonialism and life narrative, to create a new assemblage: postcolonial life narrative. Focusing in particular on testimonial narrative, from slave narrative in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Anglophone life narrative from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Palestine, North America, and India, this study follows texts on the move through adaptation, appropriation, and remediation. For postcolonial subjects life narrative offers extraordinary opportunities to present accounts of social injustice and oppression, of violence and social suffering. Testimonial narrative can reach across cultures to produce intimate attachments between those who testify and those who bear witness to legacies of apartheid, slavery, rape warfare, genocide, and dispossession. Thresholds of testimony are subject to change and for some, for example refugees and asylum seekers, opportunities to engage a witnessing public and inspire campaigns for social justice on their behalf are curtailed—these are the 'ends of testimony'. The production, circulation, and reception of testimonial life narrative connects directly to the most fundamental questions of who counts as human, what rights follow from this, and what makes for grievable life. Postcolonial life narrative is a dynamic field of literature and criticism, and this book presents a series of proximate readings that outline its distinctive imaginative geographies.

Author : Jamie D. Barker
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 169 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2020-02-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781498592703

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Trauma in 20th Century Multicultural American Poetry by Jamie D. Barker Pdf

The author argues that by using literary trauma theory in conjunction with a reader response approach, readers can gain a better understanding of how poetry can work towards building community and encouraging empowerment over oppression by establishing collectives of people who may share similar stories and experiences connected to trauma. Rather than demonstrating how the poetry may fail or trying to establish what traumatic events the speaker (or poet, in some studies) may have encountered and the significance thereof, this study focuses on how the reader may find community with the ideas represented within the poem. The poetry of various ethnicities are examined, including African American poets Amiri Baraka and Lucille Clifton, Native American poets Robin Coffee, Linda Hogan, and Peter Blue Cloud, as well as Japanese American poets Mitsuye Yamada, Keiho Soga, and Lawson Fusao Inada. Although many of these poets have had their poems examined in the past, none have been explored through this type of approach. Furthermore, very few studies have expanded upon the ideas of literary trauma theory by using reader response, and no writings have examined the idea of ambivalence in poetry as this study does.

Author : Sharon Marquart
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2015-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781442650664

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On the Defensive by Sharon Marquart Pdf

On the Defensive considers how our ethical responses to the Nazi camps have unintentionally repressed and denied the experiences of their victims. Through detailed readings of survivor narratives, particularly the works of political deportees Jorge Semprun and Charlotte Delbo, Sharon Marquart examines how well-intentioned people - including victims, their family members, and readers of witness literature - respond to such testimony in ways that are understood as ethical by their communities but serve instead to ignore victims' experiences. As Marquart shows, collective disasters such as the Holocaust expose the limitations of our ethical theories. To cope with this instability we withdraw and defend ourselves through inattentive and formulaic responses that turn a blind eye to the plight of victims. Challenging contemporary theorizations of community, ethics, testimony, and trauma, On the Defensive is a far-reaching reflection on the ways in which communal understandings of our duties and responsibilities to others can facilitate the denial of an atrocity's horrors.

Author : Michal Givoni
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2016-10-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107150942

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The Care of the Witness by Michal Givoni Pdf

The Care of the Witness explores the historical shifts in the crises of witnessing to genocide, war, and disaster and their contribution to nongovernmental politics.

Author : Erin McGlothlin,Avinoam Patt
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 226 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2024-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780810147065

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Lessons and Legacies XV by Erin McGlothlin,Avinoam Patt Pdf

The fifteenth volume in the Lessons & Legacies series, featuring multidisciplinary research in the Holocaust and Jewish cultural history on the theme of Global Perspectives and National Narratives. The fourteen chapters included in this volume manifest three broad categories: history, literature, and memory. These chapters continue the recent trend in Holocaust Studies of a focus on local history, integrating specific regional and national narratives into a more global approach to the event. Newer studies have continued to incorporate what was once termed the periphery into a more global examination of the experiences of Jewish refugees in flight to Latin America, Africa, and the Soviet Union. At the same time, very specific local studies deepen our knowledge of the mechanics of genocide, along with the experiences of refugees in flight, and the subsequent dimensions of Holocaust memory and representation. New research on Holocaust literature continues to unearth unexamined texts from the period of the war itself, which can shed light on Jewish responses to persecution and strategies for survival. The study of Holocaust testimonies continues to grapple with the challenge of language: how to convey through the limits of human language the depths of barbarity to an audience that could never fully understand what they had not personally experienced. Likewise, literary studies continue to incorporate texts that were once considered outside the standard canon of Holocaust literature, such as science fiction and children’s literature. The tension between local and global perspectives can also be seen quite clearly in what the volume's editors understand by the term “memory studies,” or new approaches to research on museums and memorials. The very specific nature of collective memory on the national level continues to be the site of the contested “politics of memory.” A number of the chapters in this volume engage with the conflict of monuments and memorials, museums’ attempts to resolve provenance issues, questions around the ethics of Holocaust tourism, and the inclusion of new technologies and digital survivors into the memorial landscape.

Author : Paula Morgan
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 118 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2019-01-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781848884069

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The Arc of Memory in the Aftermath of Trauma by Paula Morgan Pdf

Author : Meg Jensen,Margaretta Jolly
Publisher : University of Wisconsin Pres
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2014-08-26
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780299300142

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We Shall Bear Witness by Meg Jensen,Margaretta Jolly Pdf

An international array of human rights advocates, scholars, and survivor-writers examine the profound and complex impact of personal testimony about human rights abuses as expressed through autobiography, documentary film, report, oral history, blog, and verbatim theater.

Author : Heidi Grunebaum
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2017-07-28
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781351506106

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Memorializing the Past by Heidi Grunebaum Pdf

This work is a meditation on the shaping of time and its impact on living with and understanding atrocity in South Africa in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is an examination of the ways that the institutionalization of memory has managed perceptions of time and transition, of events and happenings, of sense and emotion, of violence and recovery, of the past and the new. Through this process a public language of memory has been carved into collective modes of meaning. It is a language that seems deprived of the hopes, dreams, and possibilities for the promise of a just and redemptive future it once nurtured.Truth commissions are profoundly implicated in the social politics of memorialization. Memory, as a conceptual, historical, and experiential discourse about the past, relates to the ways in which cruelty is integrated into societal understandings, which include cognitive and philosophic frameworks and constructions of social meaning. The politics of historical truth, of memory and of justice, play out in unintended ways. There is not only the ongoing struggle for survivors of state terror, but also the ways that the everyday shapings of silences, the emptiness of reconciliation and the fracturing of hope remain embedded in political life.

Author : Sybille Krämer,Sigrid Weigel
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2017-08-23
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781783489770

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Testimony/Bearing Witness by Sybille Krämer,Sigrid Weigel Pdf

Testimony/Bearing Witness establishes a dialogue between the different approaches to testimony in epistemology, historiography, law, art, media studies and psychiatry.