This book discusses the issues underlying contemporary Holocaust fiction. Using Gillian Rose’s theory of Holocaust piety, it argues that, rather than enhancing our understanding of the Holocaust, contemporary fiction has instead become overly focused on gratuitous representations of bodies in pain. The book begins by discussing the locations and imagery which have come to define our understanding of the Holocaust, before then highlighting how this gradual simplification has led to an incre...

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Man's Search for Meaning tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Viktor E. Frankl's book.Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.This short summary and analysis of Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl includes:Historical contextChapter-by-chapter...

On 25 October 1946, in a crowded room in Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face to face for the first and only time. The encounter lasted only ten minutes, and did not go well. Almost immediately, rumours started to spread around the world that the two philosophers had come to blows, armed with red-hot pokers . . .

Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories-multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large.In these new and r...

This highly original book is the first to explore the political and philosophical consequences of Hannah Arendt's concept of 'the banality of evil,' a term she used to describe Adolph Eichmann, architect of the Nazi 'final solution.' According to Bernard J. Bergen, the questions that preoccupied Arendt were the meaning and significance of the Nazi genocide to our modern times. As Bergen describes Arendt's struggle to understand 'the banality of evil,' he shows how Arendt redefined the mean...

They were Europe's greatest thinkers, but what were they like at love?Lovers of Philosophy explores the love lives of seven philosophers, and how their most intimate experiences came to shape their ideas. In these pages, the reader learns about the significance of Kant's infatuation, Hegel's premarital liaisons, Nietzsche's heartbreak, Heidegger's hypocrisy, Sartre's promiscuous polyamory, Foucault's sexual liberation, and Derrida's dalliances in extramarital desire.The sto...

Two titans of twentieth-century thought: their lives, loves, ideas, and politics.Shaking up the content and method by which generations of students had studied Western philosophy, Martin Heidegger sought to ennoble man’s existence in relation to death. Yet in a time of crisis, he sought personal advancement, becoming the most prominent German intellectual to join the Nazis.Hannah Arendt, his brilliant, beautiful student and young lover, sought to enable a d...

Silence can be a powerful form of communication. It is often the form that communication takes in the wake of unspeakable trauma. After a half a century, the Holocaust still dominates the homes of survivors and their families. Memory haunts and permeates the home, conditioning survivors' thoughts, their behaviour, their responses to their family, their reactions to government and authority. Applied linguist and academic Dr. Ruth Wajnryb grew up in such a home, living the aftermath of her p...

The story of how psychoanalysis was used in the war against Nazi Germany - in the crucial quest to understand the Nazi mind. Daniel Pick brings both the skills of the historian and the trained psychoanalyst to weave together the story of clinical encounters with leading Nazis and the Allies' broader interpretations of the Nazi high command and the mentality of the wider German public who supported them. Following the bizarre capture of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess in 1941, Pick follows clos...

'My mind refuses to play its part in the scholarly exercise. I walk around in a daze, remembering occasionally to take a picture. I've heard that many people cry here, but I am too numb to feel. The wind whips through my wool coat. I am very cold, and I imagine what the wind would have felt like for someone here fifty years ago without coat, boots, or gloves. Hours later as I write, I tell myself a story about the day, hoping it is true, and hoping it will make sense of what I did and did ...

In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetze...

Is Marx relevant any more? Why should we care what he wrote? What difference could it make to our reading of literature? Terry Eagleton, one of the foremost critics of our generation, has some answers in this wonderfully clear and readable analysis. Sharp and concise, it is, without doubt, the most important work on literary criticism that has emerged out of the tradition of Marxist philosophy and social theory since the nineteenth century.