Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness

Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness PDF Author: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443808113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
The United Nations’ declaration of 2009 as the International Year of Reconciliation is testimony to the growing use of historical commissions as instruments of reconciliation in post-conflict societies. Since the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has had a profound impact on international efforts to deal with the aftermath of mass violence and societal conflict, this is an appropriate time for scholars to debate and reflect on the work of the TRC and the wide-ranging scholarship it has inspired across disciplines. With a foreword by Harvard Law Professor Martha Minow, Memory, Narrative, and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past offers readers a front-row seat where a team of scholars draw on both theoretical analysis and case studies from around the world to explore the themes of memory, narrative, forgiveness and apology, and how these themes often interact in either mutually supportive or unsettling ways. The book is a vibrant discussion by scholars in philosophy, psychology, psychoanalytic theory, history, literary theory, and Holocaust studies. The authors explore the complex, interconnected issues of trauma and narrative (testimonial and literary narrative and theatre as narrative), mourning and the potential of forgiveness to heal the enduring effects of mass trauma, and transgenerational trauma-memory as a basis for dialogue and reconciliation in divided societies. The authors go well beyond the South African TRC and address a wide range of historical events to explore the possibilities and the challenges that lie on the path of reconciliation and forgiveness between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders in societies with a history of violent conflict and unspeakable injustice. The book provides readers with a cohesive, theoretically well-grounded analysis of the impact of traumatic memories in the personal and communal lives of survivors of trauma. It explores how narrative may be creatively applied in processes of healing trauma, and how public testimony can often restore the moral balance of societies ravaged by trauma. The book deepens understanding of the ways in which lessons from the TRC might be developed and both usefully and cautiously applied in other post-conflict situations.

Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness

Memory, Narrative and Forgiveness PDF Author: Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443808113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book

Book Description
The United Nations’ declaration of 2009 as the International Year of Reconciliation is testimony to the growing use of historical commissions as instruments of reconciliation in post-conflict societies. Since the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has had a profound impact on international efforts to deal with the aftermath of mass violence and societal conflict, this is an appropriate time for scholars to debate and reflect on the work of the TRC and the wide-ranging scholarship it has inspired across disciplines. With a foreword by Harvard Law Professor Martha Minow, Memory, Narrative, and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past offers readers a front-row seat where a team of scholars draw on both theoretical analysis and case studies from around the world to explore the themes of memory, narrative, forgiveness and apology, and how these themes often interact in either mutually supportive or unsettling ways. The book is a vibrant discussion by scholars in philosophy, psychology, psychoanalytic theory, history, literary theory, and Holocaust studies. The authors explore the complex, interconnected issues of trauma and narrative (testimonial and literary narrative and theatre as narrative), mourning and the potential of forgiveness to heal the enduring effects of mass trauma, and transgenerational trauma-memory as a basis for dialogue and reconciliation in divided societies. The authors go well beyond the South African TRC and address a wide range of historical events to explore the possibilities and the challenges that lie on the path of reconciliation and forgiveness between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders in societies with a history of violent conflict and unspeakable injustice. The book provides readers with a cohesive, theoretically well-grounded analysis of the impact of traumatic memories in the personal and communal lives of survivors of trauma. It explores how narrative may be creatively applied in processes of healing trauma, and how public testimony can often restore the moral balance of societies ravaged by trauma. The book deepens understanding of the ways in which lessons from the TRC might be developed and both usefully and cautiously applied in other post-conflict situations.

Forgiveness and Remembrance

Forgiveness and Remembrance PDF Author: Jeffrey Blustein
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199329400
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The theme of this book is the complex moral psychology of forgiving and remembering in both personal and political contexts. It offers an original account of the moral psychology of interpersonal forgiveness and explores its role in transitional societies. The book also examines the symbolic moral significance of memorialization in these societies and reflects on its relationship to forgiveness.

The End of Memory

The End of Memory PDF Author: Miroslav Volf
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467462020
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Winner of the Christianity Today Book Award in Christianity and Culture How should we remember atrocities? Should we ever forgive abusers? Can we not hope for final reconciliation, even if it means redeemed victims and perpetrators spending eternity together? We live in an age that insists that past wrongs—genocides, terrorist attacks, bald personal injustices—should never be forgotten. But Miroslav Volf here proposes the radical idea that letting go of such memories—after a certain point and under certain conditions—may actually be a gift of grace we should embrace. Volf’s personal stories of persecution and interrogation frame his search for theological resources to make memories a wellspring of healing rather than a source of deepening pain and animosity. Controversial, thoughtful, and incisively reasoned, The End of Memory begins a conversation that we avoid to our great detriment. This second edition includes an appendix on the memories of perpetrators as well as victims, a response to critics, and a James K. A. Smith interview with Volf about the nature and function of memory in the Christian life.

Memory, History, Forgetting

Memory, History, Forgetting PDF Author: Paul Ricoeur
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226713466
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal “Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review

Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel

Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel PDF Author:
Publisher: Brill
ISBN: 940120845X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The contributions to this volume probe the complex relationship of trauma, memory, and narrative. By looking at the South African situation through the lens of trauma, they make clear how the psychic deformations and injuries left behind by racism and colonialism cannot be mended by material reparation or by simply reversing economic and political power-structures. Western trauma theories – as developed by scholars such as Caruth, van der Kolk, Herman and others – are insufficient for analysing the more complex situation in a postcolony such as South Africa. This is because Western trauma concepts focus on the individual traumatized by a single identifiable event that causes PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). What we need is an understanding of trauma that sees it not only as a result of an identifiable event but also as the consequence of an historical condition – in the case of South Africa, that of colonialism, and, more specifically, of apartheid. For most black and coloured South Africans, the structural violence of apartheid’s laws were the existential condition under which they had to exist. The living conditions in the townships, pass laws, relocation, and racial segregation affected great parts of the South African population and were responsible for the collective traumatization of several generations. This trauma, however, is not an unclaimed (and unclaimable) experience. Postcolonial thinkers who have been reflecting on the experience of violence and trauma in a colonial context, writing from within a Fanonian tradition, have, on the contrary, believed in the importance of reclaiming the past and of transcending mechanisms of victimization and resentment, so typical of traumatized consciousnesses. Narration and the novel have a decisive role to play here.

The Book of Memory Gaps

The Book of Memory Gaps PDF Author: Cecilia Ruiz
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
ISBN: 0399171932
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
"A hauntingly witty, illustrated debut in the vein of Edward Gorey, that explores the power and mystery of human memory, by artist Cecilia Ruiz"--

Survivor Transitional Narratives of Nazi-Era Destruction

Survivor Transitional Narratives of Nazi-Era Destruction PDF Author: Dennis B. Klein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350037168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Survivor Transitional Narratives of Nazi-Era Destruction: The Second Liberation examines the historical circumstances that gave rise in the 1960s to the first cohort of Nazi-era survivors who massed a public campaign focusing on remembrance of Nazi racial crimes. The survivors' decision to engage and disquiet a public audience occurred against the backdrop of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and the West German debate over the enforcement of statutory limitations for prosecuting former Nazis. Dennis B. Klein focuses on the accounts of three survivors: Jean Améry, an Austrian ex-patriot who joined the Belgian Resistance during the war, Vladimir Jankélévitch, a member of the French Resistance, and Simon Wiesenthal, who dedicated his life after the war to investigating Nazi crimes. As Klein argues, their accounts, in addition to acting as a reminder of Nazi-era endemic criminality, express a longing for human fellowshipThis contextual and interdisciplinary interpretation illustrates the explanatory significance of contemporary events and individual responses to them in shaping the memory and legacy of Nazi-era destruction. It is essential reading for students and scholars of the Nazi era and its legacy, genocide studies, Jewish Studies, and the history of emotions.

The Book of Memory

The Book of Memory PDF Author: Petina Gappah
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374714886
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The story that you have asked me to tell you does not begin with the pitiful ugliness of Lloyd’s death. It begins on a long-ago day in August when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man. Memory, the narrator of Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory, is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, after being sentenced for murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. The death penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and metaphorically, writing for her life. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers? Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between past and present, the 2009 Guardian First Book Award–winning writer Petina Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.

Narrative Psychology and Vygotsky in Dialogue

Narrative Psychology and Vygotsky in Dialogue PDF Author: Jill Bradbury
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351375334
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This book draws together two domains of psychological theory, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory of cognition and narrative theories of identity, to offer a way of rethinking the human subject as embodied, relational and temporal. A dialogue between these two ostensibly disparate and contested theoretical trajectories provides a new vantage point from which to explore questions of personal and political change. In a world of deepening inequalities and increasing economic precarity, the demand for free, decolonised quality education as articulated by the South African Student Movement and in many other contexts around the world, is disrupting established institutional practices and reinvigorating possibilities for change. This context provokes new lines of hopeful thought and critical reflection on (dis)continuities across historical time, theories of (social and psychological) developmental processes and the practices of intergenerational life, particularly in the domain of education, for the making of emancipatory futures. This is essential reading for academics and students interested in Vygotskian and narrative theory and critical psychology, as well as those interested in the politics and praxis of higher education.

Healing Life's Hurts

Healing Life's Hurts PDF Author: Matthew Linn
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 9780809120598
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
"Explores the concept of emotional and physical healing as well as exploring the five stages of acceptance of death and dying in light of prayer and religious experience"--Amazon.com.