Kirjahaku

In the wake of World War II, the Nazi genocide of European Jews has come to stand for ""the unspeakable,"" posing crucial challenges to the representation of suffering, the articulation of identity, and the practice of ethics in an increasingly multinational and multicultural world. In this book, Naomi Mandel argues against the ""unspeakable"" as any kind of inherent quality of such an event, insisting that the term is a rhetorical tactic strategically employed to further specific cultural and political agendas. While claiming to preserve the uniqueness, sanctity, and inviolability of human suffering, the author writes, the assumption that suffering is unspeakable works to silence and negate the suffering human body and finally enables us to forget our own vulnerability to suffering. Discussing a variety of texts such as Toni Morrison's ""Beloved"", Steven Spielberg's ""Schindler's List"", and William Styron's ""Confessions of Nat Turner"", Mandel asks: What does the evocation of the limits of language enable writers, authors, and critics to do? With the goal of reconciling language and corporeality and integrating experience into the economy of language, community, identity, and ethics, she shows how, when, and why the term ""unspeakable"" is used. Mandel draws on critical theory, literary analysis, and film studies to offer a paradigm of reading that will enable the crucial work on comparative atrocities and the representation of suffering to move beyond the impasse of ""unspeakability."" Her book will appeal to scholars in the study of trauma and genocide, anti-Semitism and racism, as well as in literary, cultural, and comparative ethnic studies.

In the wake of World War II, the Nazi genocide of European Jews has come to stand for ""the unspeakable,"" posing crucial challenges to the representation of suffering, the articulation of identity, and the practice of ethics in an increasingly multinational and multicultural world. In this book, Naomi Mandel argues against the ""unspeakable"" as any kind of inherent quality of such an event, insisting that the term is a rhetorical tactic strategically employed to further specific cultural and political agendas. While claiming to preserve the uniqueness, sanctity, and inviolability of human suffering, the author writes, the assumption that suffering is unspeakable works to silence and negate the suffering human body and finally enables us to forget our own vulnerability to suffering. Discussing a variety of texts such as Toni Morrison's ""Beloved"", Steven Spielberg's ""Schindler's List"", and William Styron's ""Confessions of Nat Turner"", Mandel asks: What does the evocation of the limits of language enable writers, authors, and critics to do? With the goal of reconciling language and corporeality and integrating experience into the economy of language, community, identity, and ethics, she shows how, when, and why the term ""unspeakable"" is used. Mandel draws on critical theory, literary analysis, and film studies to offer a paradigm of reading that will enable the crucial work on comparative atrocities and the representation of suffering to move beyond the impasse of ""unspeakability."" Her book will appeal to scholars in the study of trauma and genocide, anti-Semitism and racism, as well as in literary, cultural, and comparative ethnic studies.

Generation X, comprised of people born between 1960 and 1980, is a generation with no Great War or Depression to define it. Dismissed as apathetic slackers and detached losers, Xers have a striking disregard for the causes and isms that defined their Boomer parents. In Disappear Here: Violence after Generation X, Naomi Mandel argues that this characterization of Generation X can be traced back to changing experiences and representations of violence in the late twentieth century. Examining developments in media, philosophy, literature, and politics in the years Xers were coming of age, Mandel demonstrates that Generation X s unique attitude toward violence was formed by developments in home media, personal computing, and reality TV. This attitude, Mandel contends, is key to understanding our current world of media ubiquity, online activism, simulated sensation, and jihad. With chapters addressing both fictional and filmic representations of violence, Mandel studies the work of Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Claire Messud, Jess Walter, and Jonathan Safran Foer. A critical and conceptual tour de force, Disappear Here sets forth a new, and necessary, approach to violence, the real, and real violence for the twenty-first century. "