This book analyzes contemporary visual art produced in the context of conflict and trauma from a range of countries, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. It focuses on what makes visual language unique, arguing that the "affective" quality of art contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and loss. By extending the concept of empathy, it also demonstrates how we might, through art, make connections with people in different parts of the world whose experiences differ from our own. The book makes a distinct contribution to trauma studies, which has tended to concentrate on literary forms of expression. It also offers a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the operations of art, drawing on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, but setting this within a postcolonial framework. Empathic Vision will appeal to anyone interested in the role of culture in post-September 11 global politics.
From ancient Greece through the present day, women writers have confronted the male urge to make war by imagining communities in which intuitive bonding among individuals questions and replaces masculinist values of aggression and competition. Women's Vision in Western Literature traces the gender gap in literature from 600 B.C. to the present day through an examination of seven extraordinary women writers from Sappho to Christa Wolf. Combining close readings with a comprehensive overview of the careers of these women, Porter shows how the threat, the experience, and the aftermath of war incites them to imagine tolerant, empathic communities. This careful consideration of these seven great writers brings to light an underappreciated aspect of Western women's writing. Starting with Sappho, Porter illustrates this ancient poet's ability to rewrite the Homeric war rhetoric to reflect a non-possessive love experience. Marie de France arranges traditional animal fables to imply an open-ended situation-ethics, according to the author, and Madame de Stael—in a Europe torn by Napoleonic conquests—advocates cross-cultural unions among countries. In the works of Mary Shelley, we see the warnings of the dangers of vainglorious, soulless technology, and Virginia Woolf depicts intuitive bonding beyond gender stereotypes, amid the ruins of war and crumbling empire. He shows how Marguerite Yourcenar dreams of a new era of world peace after Hitler's defeat, and how Christa Wolf tries to cope with her country's Nazi past even as she reaffirms European identity threatened by annihilations in nuclear conflict.
Are you a good listener? How well do you really know the people around you? A capacity for empathic understanding is hard-wired in our brains, but its full expression involves particular listening skills that are seldom learned through ordinary experience. Through clear explanation, specific examples, and practical exercises, Dr. Miller offers a step-by-step process for developing your skillfulness in empathic listening. With a solid basis in sixty years of scientific research, these communication skills are not limited to professionals, and can be learned and applied in your everyday life. Instead of assuming that you know the meaning of what you think you heard, empathic listening lets you develop a more accurate understanding and prevent miscommunication. Empathic understanding can help to deepen personal relationships, alleviate conflict, communicate across differences, and promote positive change. The author also discusses skills for expressing yourself clearly, and for strengthening close relationships and friendships. Through empathic understanding you have access to life experience far beyond your own, and over time, listening well and deeply becomes a way of being, fostering a compassionate and patient acceptance of human frailties--those of others as well as your own.
In 1983 US president Ronald Reagan told the Israeli Prime Minister that he, as a photographer during World War II, had documented the atrocities of the concentration camps on film. The story was later exposed as a fraud as it was revealed that Reagan had resided in Hollywood during the entire war. Does this mean that Reagan was simply an amoral liar or that he established a connection to the Holocaust that can be said to have evolved from the intersection between “real” and “reel”?
Visions and Revisions. Performance, Memory, Trauma brings the fields of performance studies and trauma studies together in conversation in order to investigate how these two fields both “envision” and “revision” one another in relation to crucial themes such as trauma, testimony, witness, and spectatorship. According to Peggy Phelan, a leading performance studies scholar, performance provides a unique model for witnessing events that are both unbearably real and beyond reason’s ability to grasp – traumatic events like the Holocaust. While Reagan’s claim is obviously both paradoxical and problematic, it opens up a space in which the potential insights that performance studies and trauma studies might bring to one another become particularly visible.
The first half of the anthology focuses on issues of spectatorship, specifically its ethics and the possibility of witnessing. The second half widens the discussion to include memory more broadly, shifting the emphasis from sight to site, and particularly to site-specific works and the embodied encounters they model, enable and enact. The contributors here fill a critical gap, raising questions about how popular and mediatized performances that memoralize trauma might be viewed through performance theory. They also look at how performance studies might shift its focus from the visual to the sensorial and material and in doing so, they offer a fresh perspective on both performance and trauma studies.
Writing from different disciplinary vantages and drawing on multiple case studies from South Africa, the former Soviet Union, Lebanon and Thailand, among others, the contributors decolonize trauma studies and make us question, how and where our own eyes and bodies are positioned as we revision the scenes before us.
Contributors: Laurie Beth Clark/Helena Grehan/Geraldine Harris/ Chris Hudson/Petra Kuppers/Adrian Lahoud/Sam Spurr/Christine Stoddard/Bryoni Trezise/Maria Tumarkin/Caroline Wake.
Editors: Bryoni Trezise is a lecturer in theatre and performance studies at the University of New South Wales, where Caroline Wake is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia.
Discover the Six Habits of Highly Empathic People A popular speaker and co-founder of The School of Life, Roman Krznaric has traveled the world researching and lecturing on the subject of empathy. In this lively and engaging book, he argues that our brains are wired for social connection. Empathy, not apathy or self-centeredness, is at the heart of who we are. By looking outward and attempting to identify with the experiences of others, Krznaric argues, we can become not only a more equal society, but also a happier and more creative one. Through encounters with groundbreaking actors, activists, designers, nurses, bankers and neuroscientists, Krznaric defines a new breed of adventurer. He presents the six life-enhancing habits of highly empathic people, whose skills enable them to connect with others in extraordinary ways – making themselves, and the world, more truly fulfilled.
An interdisciplinary study of skin bridging cultural and psychoanalytic theory to consider how the body's "exterior" is central to human subjectivity and relations. The authors explore racialization, body modification, self-harm, and comedic representations of skin, drawing from the clinical domain, visual arts, popular culture, and literature.
The author establishes a new foundation for the use and value of clinical empathy that is based on a distinction between treatment and healing, and a model for using psychotherapy as a component of an organized system of care: focused, attuned to the patient's presenting motive, and consistent with our understanding of the relationship between mind and brain.
Empathy is profoundly important for understanding people's feelings and behaviour. It is not only an essential skill in conducting successful personal and working relationships, it also helps us understand what makes people moral and societies decent. With this compelling book, David Howe invites the reader on an illuminating journey of discovery into how empathy was first conceptualised and how its influence has steadily risen and spread. He captures the growing significance of empathy to many fields, from evolutionary psychology and brain science to moral philosophy and mental health. In doing so, he eloquently explains its importance to child development, intimate relationships, therapy, the creative arts, neurology and ethics. Written with light touch, this is an authoritative and insightful guide to empathy, its importance, why we have it and how it develops. It offers an invaluable introduction for readers everywhere, including those studying or working in psychology, counselling, psychotherapy, social work, health, nursing and education.
Trauma and Meaning Making highlights multiple practices of meaning making after traumatic events in the lives of individuals and communities. Meaning making consists both in a personal journey towards a new way to exist and live in a world shattered by trauma and in public politics locating and defining what has happened. In both perspectives, the collection evaluates the impact achieved by naming the victim/s and thus the right of the victim/s to suffer from its aftermath or by refusing to recognise the traumatic event and thus the right of the victim/s to respond to it. A range of paradigms and techniques invite readers to consider anew the specificities of context and relationship while negotiating post-traumatic survival. By delineating how one makes sense of traumatic events, this volume will enable readers to draw links between practices grounded in diverse disciplines encompassing creative arts, textual analysis, public and collective communication, psychology and psychotherapy, memory and memorial.
