Representing Genocide

Representing Genocide PDF Author: Rebecca Jinks
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474256953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book explores the diverse ways in which Holocaust representations have influenced and structured how other genocides are understood and represented in the West. Rebecca Jinks focuses in particular on the canonical 20th century cases of genocide: Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Using literature, film, photography, and memorialisation, she demonstrates that we can only understand the Holocaust's status as a 'benchmark' for other genocides if we look at the deeper, structural resonances which subtly shape many representations of genocide. Representing Genocide pursues five thematic areas in turn: how genocides are recognised as such by western publics; the representation of the origins and perpetrators of genocide; how western witnesses represent genocide; representations of the aftermath of genocide; and western responses to genocide. Throughout, the book distinguishes between 'mainstream' and other, more nuanced and engaged, representations of genocide. It shows how these mainstream representations – the majority – largely replicate the representational framework of the Holocaust, including the way in which mainstream Holocaust representations resist recognising the rationality, instrumentality and normality of genocide, preferring instead to present it as an aberrant, exceptional event in human society. By contrast, the more engaged representations – often, but not always, originating from those who experienced genocide – tend to revolve around precisely genocide's ordinariness, and the structures and situations common to human society which contribute to and become involved in the violence.

imagining the unimaginable

imagining the unimaginable PDF Author: Ladina Bezzola Lambert
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004484884
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
How is it possible to imagine what is unknown and therefore unimaginable? How can the unimaginable be represented? On what materials do such representations rely? These questions lie at the heart of this book. Copernican theory redefined the role and importance of the imagination even as it implied the moment of its crisis. Based on this claim, Ladina Bezzola Lambert analyzes seventeenth-century astronomical texts – particularly descriptions of the moon and treatises written in support of the theory of the plurality of worlds – to show how early modern astronomers questioned the role of the imagination as a tool to visualize the unknown, but also how, pressed by the need to support their theories with convincing descriptions of other potential worlds, they sought to overcome the limitations of the imagination with a sophisticated rhetoric and techniques more commonly associated with poetic writing. The limitations of the imagination are at once a problem that all of the texts discussed struggle with and their recurrent theme. In the first and last chapter, the focus shifts to a more explicitly literary context: Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and the work of Italo Calvino. The change of focus from science to literature and from the narratives of the past to contemporary ones serves to emphasize that the issues relating to the imagination, its limitations and creative means, are basically the same both in science and literature and that they are still relevant today.

Terror and Violence

Terror and Violence PDF Author: Andrew Strathern
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
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Representing Genocide

Representing Genocide PDF Author: Rebecca Jinks
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474256953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book explores the diverse ways in which Holocaust representations have influenced and structured how other genocides are understood and represented in the West. Rebecca Jinks focuses in particular on the canonical 20th century cases of genocide: Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Using literature, film, photography, and memorialisation, she demonstrates that we can only understand the Holocaust's status as a 'benchmark' for other genocides if we look at the deeper, structural resonances which subtly shape many representations of genocide. Representing Genocide pursues five thematic areas in turn: how genocides are recognised as such by western publics; the representation of the origins and perpetrators of genocide; how western witnesses represent genocide; representations of the aftermath of genocide; and western responses to genocide. Throughout, the book distinguishes between 'mainstream' and other, more nuanced and engaged, representations of genocide. It shows how these mainstream representations – the majority – largely replicate the representational framework of the Holocaust, including the way in which mainstream Holocaust representations resist recognising the rationality, instrumentality and normality of genocide, preferring instead to present it as an aberrant, exceptional event in human society. By contrast, the more engaged representations – often, but not always, originating from those who experienced genocide – tend to revolve around precisely genocide's ordinariness, and the structures and situations common to human society which contribute to and become involved in the violence.

The Science of Aliens

The Science of Aliens PDF Author: Mark Brake
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1510767118
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Discover the real science behind 2001, ET, Signs, and all your favorite fictional alien civilizations. As space telescopes continue to search for life in this unearthly Universe, the crucial questions remain unanswered. Are we awake to the revolutionary effects on human society and science that alien contact will bring? And how is it possible to imagine the unknown? The Science of Aliens tells the compelling story of how the portrayal of alien life has evolved over time. Taking examples from science, film, and fiction, this book showcases how scholars, filmmakers, and authors have devoted their energies to imagining life beyond this Earth. From Copernicus to Kubrick, The Science of Aliens is a fascinating account for anyone interested in extraterrestrials. Otherworldly topics include: What Xenomorphs from Alien and Na’vi from Avatar have in common Darwin among aliens Extraterrestrials in Einstein’s sky Aliens in our space age And so much more Visualize the unknown and redefine your place in a changing cosmos with The Science of Aliens.

Representing Middle-earth

Representing Middle-earth PDF Author: Robert T. Tally Jr.
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786470372
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
In such classic works as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien depicts a vast, complex world-system. Tolkien's Middle-earth comes to life with intensely detailed historical, geographical, and multicultural content, which is presented through different poetic forms that combine elements of epic, romance, myth, history, and the modern novel. This book analyzes Tolkien's project, paying attention to narrative form and its relation to social contexts, while also exploring his broader philosophical conception of history and the role of individual and collective subjects within it. Tolkien's published and posthumous writings, the film adaptations, and recent scholarship are all examined to provide an enlarged and refined critical perspective of these major works. Drawing upon Marxist literary theory and criticism, Robert T. Tally Jr. calls into question traditional views of race, class, morality, escapism, and fantasy more generally. Through close readings mixed with theoretical speculation, Representing Middle-earth allows readers see Tolkien's world, as well as our own, in a new light.

The Book of Unconformities

The Book of Unconformities PDF Author: Hugh Raffles
Publisher: Verse Chorus Press
ISBN: 1891241745
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear. A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.

Return to Meaning

Return to Meaning PDF Author: Andrew Cort
Publisher: Andrew Cort
ISBN: 143821409X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 559

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Book Description
If God exists, and God is all powerful and good, why did God create an imperfect world? Does religion have a credible answer? Morality, as secularists know, does not require a deity. Blind faith, as atheists know, often leads to hatred and war. Taking scriptural stories as literal history, as scientists know, borders on the nonsensical. There has to be more. And there is. In their most important sense, these are symbolic psychological stories. Everything that happens - the wars, the joys, the obstacles that are overcome - must occur in one's own soul. In other words, all the great myths and scriptures are how-to manuals for Initiation. In this groundbreaking work, Andrew Cort describes the inner journey of Creation and Return that is revealed by the Greek Myths, the Torah, the Gospels and the Qur'an. He demonstrates the stunning unity of our western religious traditions, whose common aim is to enlighten the soul and restore a sense of meaning to our lives and culture.

Representing the Unpresentable

Representing the Unpresentable PDF Author: Negar Mottahedah
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815631798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In this pioneering book, Negar Mottahedeh explores the central issues of vision and visibility in Iranian culture. She focuses on historical and literary texts to understand the use of visual culture and performance traditions in the production of the contemporary nation. Tracing the historical mediation and dissemination of ideas for national reform in the modern period of Iran, the book examines the various discourses that have constituted the image of the unpresentable “Babi” as the figure of Iran’s Other. In her exploration of gender and Iranian cinema, the author powerfully argues that this unpresentable image continues to haunt contemporary Iranian cinema’s representations of the nation. As cinema began to displace other forms of representation in Iran, Islamic culture attempted to keep the motion picture industry free from what it perceived to be the taint of foreign values and intervention. With insight and detail, Mottahedeh looks at the revealing ways in which contemporary Iranian cinema has dealt with representing an unpresentable national modernity articulated through traversals in time and space. These deeply national tropes of traversal shaped the image of the “Babi,” against which nineteenth-century Iran produced its own modernity. This highly original work, signaling a paradigmatic shift in Iranian studies and gender studies, will be an invaluable resource for scholars in cultural, Iranian, or film studies.

Remembering and Representing the Experience of War in Twentieth-century France

Remembering and Representing the Experience of War in Twentieth-century France PDF Author: Debra Kelly
Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This work analyzes the representation of the experience of war in 20th-century France. It focuses on aspects of cultural history and memory as manifested in public ceremonies, oral history and literary production. It examines World War I and II, the Occupation, collaboration, and Resistance.

This Is Chance!

This Is Chance! PDF Author: Jon Mooallem
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0525509925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The thrilling, cinematic story of a community shattered by disaster—and the extraordinary woman who helped pull it back together “A powerful, heart-wrenching book, as much art as it is journalism.”—The Wall Street Journal “A beautifully wrought and profoundly joyful story of compassion and perseverance.”—BuzzFeed (Best Books of the Year) In the spring of 1964, Anchorage, Alaska, was a modern-day frontier town yearning to be a metropolis—the largest, proudest city in a state that was still brand-new. But just before sundown on Good Friday, the community was jolted by the most powerful earthquake in American history, a catastrophic 9.2 on the Richter Scale. For four and a half minutes, the ground lurched and rolled. Streets cracked open and swallowed buildings whole. And once the shaking stopped, night fell and Anchorage went dark. The city was in disarray and sealed off from the outside world. Slowly, people switched on their transistor radios and heard a familiar woman’s voice explaining what had just happened and what to do next. Genie Chance was a part-time radio reporter and working mother who would play an unlikely role in the wake of the disaster, helping to put her fractured community back together. Her tireless broadcasts over the next three days would transform her into a legendary figure in Alaska and bring her fame worldwide—but only briefly. That Easter weekend in Anchorage, Genie and a cast of endearingly eccentric characters—from a mountaineering psychologist to the local community theater group staging Our Town—were thrown into a jumbled world they could not recognize. Together, they would make a home in it again. Drawing on thousands of pages of unpublished documents, interviews with survivors, and original broadcast recordings, This Is Chance! is the hopeful, gorgeously told story of a single catastrophic weekend and proof of our collective strength in a turbulent world. There are moments when reality instantly changes—when the life we assume is stable gets upended by pure chance. This Is Chance! is an electrifying and lavishly empathetic portrayal of one community rising above the randomness, a real-life fable of human connection withstanding chaos.