How do we come to terms with what can't be forgotten?

How do we bear witness to extreme experiences that challenge the limits of language? This remarkable volume explores the emotional, political, and aesthetic dimensions of testimonies to trauma as they translate private anguish into public space. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw have assembled a collection of essays that trace the legacy of the Holocaust and subsequent events that have shaped twentieth-century history and still haunt contemporary culture.

Extremities combines personal and scholarly approaches to a wide range of texts that bear witness to shocking and moving accounts of individual trauma: Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Tatana Kellner's Holocaust art, Ruth Klüger's powerful memoir Still Alive, and Binjamin Wilkomirski's controversial narrative of concentration camp suffering Fragments. The book grapples with the cultural and social effects of historical crises, including the Montreal Massacre, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the medical catastrophes of HIV/AIDS and breast cancer.

Developing insights from autobiography, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and gender studies, the authors demonstrate that testimonies of troubling and taboo subjects do more than just add to the culture of confession–-they transform identities and help reimagine the boundaries of community. Extremities offers an original and timely interpretive guide to the growing field of trauma studies. The volume includes essays by Ross Chambers, Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and others.

The difficulties that have dogged the Northern Ireland peace process and the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement are rarely out of the headlines. This book gives an insight into one of the issues at stake for the people of Northern Ireland – the long-term impact of political violence on the civil population.

The result of extensive research among local communities, and drawing on survey and interview evidence, Northern Ireland After the Good Friday Agreement sets this issue within the context of past conflict and the continuing sectarian violence of the present. In particular it presents the views of ordinary people about their personal experiences of political violence and the impact it has had upon their lives.

Moreover, it shows how the Troubles have affected the young people of the region, and looks at the problems facing a society coming out of a protracted period of low-intensity conflict.

The claim of this book is that it is a precondition for Heaven that victims experience an eschatological healing of their other-inflicted wounds. Nathan O’Halloran, SJ, argues that the best theological space in which to locate this eschatological healing is in what he terms Paradise-in-Purgatory. The doctrine of Purgatory developed as a postmortem theological category for addressing sins committed after baptism and for which adequate penance has not been completed before death. In its full doctrinal articulations at Lyons II, Florence, and Trent, Purgatory is a doctrine concerned with personal, self-inflicted sin. Victims, on the other hand, require healing from other-inflicted sin rather than self-inflicted sin. For this reason, a certain expansion of this Catholic doctrine is required to make theological space for victims. O’Halloran argues that he has found that theological space within the Church’s ample tradition. The wellspring from which the doctrine of Purgatory emerged contains a richer content than has been represented thus far by conciliar definitions. Paradise in Purgatory maintains that the soteriological logic out of which Purgatory developed can be extended also to the postmortem healing of victims, and the soteriological logic of the New Testament supports this conclusion. Using as fundamental touchstones the wiping away of victims’ tears in the Book of Revelation, and the healing of Dinocrates through the prayers of his sister Perpetua in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, O’Halloran argues that victims must have an opportunity to experience full postmortem salvation from other-inflicted sin. The volume concludes that Purgatory can be theologically expanded to include a Paradise-in-Purgatory, i.e., a process that heals the other-inflicted wounds of sin which victims carry with them through death. The wounds of victims cannot be eschatologically discarded but must be subjected to the healing salvation which Christ came to offer.

Many westerners used to call the Soviet Union "Russia." Russians too regarded it as their country, but that did not mean they were entirely happy with it. In the end, in fact, Russia actually destroyed the Soviet Union. How did this happen, and what kind of Russia emerged?

In this illuminating book, Geoffrey Hosking explores what the Soviet experience meant for Russians. One of the keys lies in messianism--the idea rooted in Russian Orthodoxy that the Russians were a "chosen people." The communists reshaped this notion into messianic socialism, in which the Soviet order would lead the world in a new direction. Neither vision, however, fit the "community spirit" of the Russian people, and the resulting clash defined the Soviet world.

Hosking analyzes how the Soviet state molded Russian identity, beginning with the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war. He discusses the severe dislocations resulting from collectivization and industrialization; the relationship between ethnic Russians and other Soviet peoples; the dramatic effects of World War II on ideas of homeland and patriotism; the separation of "Russian" and "Soviet" culture; leadership and the cult of personality; and the importance of technology in the Soviet world view.

At the heart of this penetrating work is the fundamental question of what happens to a people who place their nationhood at the service of empire. There is no surer guide than Geoffrey Hosking to reveal the historical forces forging Russian identity in the post-communist world.

Blame society. Blame a bad upbringing. Blame the circumstances. Blame the victim--she may even blame herself. But what about the perpetrator? When the blame is all assigned, will anyone be left to take responsibility?

This powerful book takes up the disturbing topic of victimization and blame as a pathology of our time and its consequences for personal responsibility. By probing the psychological dynamics of victims and perpetrators of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, Sharon Lamb seeks to answer some crucial questions: How do victims become victims and sometimes perpetrators? How can we break the psychological circle of perpetrators blaming others and victims blaming themselves? How do victims and perpetrators view their actions and reactions? And how does our social response to them facilitate patterns of excuse?

With clarity and compassion, Lamb examines the theories, excuses, and psychotherapies that strip both victims of their power and perpetrators of their agency--and thus deprive them of the means to human dignity, healing, and reparation. She shows how the current practice of painting victims as pure innocents may actually help perpetrators of abuse to shirk responsibility for their actions; they too can claim to be victims in their own right, passive and will-less in their wrongdoing.

The Trouble with Blame clarifies the social cost (quickly becoming so apparent) of letting perpetrators off too easily, and points out the dangers of over-emphasizing victimization, two problems which eclipse our dire need for accountability and recovery.

In 1956, a group of Waorani men killed five North American missionaries in Ecuador. The event cemented the Waorani's reputation as ""wild Amazonian Indians"" in the eyes of the outside world. It also added to the myth of the violent Amazon created by colonial writers and still found in academia and the state development agendas across the region.

Victims and Warriors examines contemporary violence in the context of political and economic processes that transcend local events. Casey High explores how popular imagery of Amazonian violence has become part of Waorani social memory in oral histories, folklore performances, and indigenous political activism. As Amazonian forms of social memory merge with constructions of masculinity and other intercultural processes, the Waorani absorb missionaries, oil development, and logging depredations into their legacy of revenge killings and narratives of victimhood. High shows that these memories of past violence form sites of negotiation and cultural innovation, and thus violence comes to constitute a central part of Amazonian sociality, identity, and memory.

Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer, one of the twentieth century’s most famous filmmakers, is best known for his masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and his midcentury classics, Day of Wrath and Ordet. Both viewers and scholars largely leave his early work, for Nordisk Film, on the shelf, dismissing it as immature melodramatic fare produced for a company known for superficial, popular entertainment. In the received historiography, Dreyer broke with Nordisk in the pursuit of developing his film as a high art, eventually succeeding on the world stage as an auteur and eschewing melodrama in favor of austere art film.

Amanda Doxtater offers a necessary corrective to this narrative of his bifurcated career. Close readings of Dreyer’s Nordisk films alongside his mature work reveal a stylistic throughline Doxtater terms “art melodrama,” a form combining the ambiguity, stylization, and consciousness of art cinema with the heightened emotional expressivity and dramatic embodiments characteristic of melodrama. She argues that Dreyer’s major artistic concerns known from his later work—pathos, authenticity, the embodiment of psychological duress, and so on—find their first expression in his Nordisk melodramas, complicating our understanding not only of his later films but also of his early works, and even our understanding of the melodramatic mode in general. Indeed, extending well beyond the career of a singular director, this book challenges assumptions about the relationship between “low-brow” melodrama and “high-brow” art cinema.