Imagining The Unimaginable

Imagining the Unimaginable examines popular fiction's treatment of the Holocaust in the dystopian and alternate history genres of speculative fiction, analyzing the effectiveness of the genre's major works as a lens through which to view the most prominent historical trauma of the 20th century. It surveys a range of British and American authors, from science fiction pulp to Pulitzer Prize winners, building on scholarship across disciplines, including Holocaust studies, trauma studies, and science fiction studies. The conventional discourse around the Holocaust is one of the unapproachable, unknowable, and the unimaginable. The Holocaust has been compared to an earthquake, another planet, another universe, a void. It has been said to be beyond language, or else have its own incomprehensible language, beyond art, and beyond thought. The 'othering' of the event has spurred the phenomenon of non-realist Holocaust literature, engaging with speculative fiction and its history of the uncanny, the grotesque, and the inhuman. This book examines the most common forms of nonmimetic Holocaust fiction, the dystopia and the alternate history, while firmly positioning these forms within a broader pattern of non-realist engagements with the Holocaust.

Mechademia 10 revolves around a maelstrom of events: the devastation of 3/11—the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor crises—and the ongoing environmental disasters that have recently overtaken Japan. Because anime and manga have long proposed (and illustrated) alternative worlds—some created after catastrophes—it is fitting that this volume should consider this propensity for “world renewal.” Individual essays range widely, from a poetic and personal reflection on the ritual of tôrô nagashi (the lighting of floating paper lanterns that has traditionally commemorated souls lost in great public cataclysms, such as war) to a study of the various counterfactual histories written about the historical figure of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a former peasant farmer who became a military dictator of feudal Japan. The book also includes an original manga, Nanohana, from the popular artist Hagio Moto, who is quoted as saying: “I want to think together with everyone else about Fukushima and Chernobyl, about the future of the Earth, about the future of humankind, and to keep thinking moving forward.”

Like its companion Seventy Moral (and Immoral) Polarities of the Everyday (2016), this volume is a set of seventy mini-meditations on opposite states of the moral or emotional life – goodness and badness, ugly and beautiful, quiet and raucous. Each item, in each polarity, is allowed to gather up a picture, a tale, or a logical adventure, and then to leave behind it multi-part reflections which play out in the reader’s mind. The operational energy here is partly prayer or mantra and partly half-completed logical conundrum. Is there a new form of private devotional at work here?

From the contents: How metaphors matter: Astolfo's lunar journey in the Orlando furioso. - Images proposed in Jest: Galileo's Sidereus nuncius and the dialogue. - The stuff that dreams are made of: Kepler's Somnium. - Worlds of words: Cyrano de Bergerac's Lune and Soleil. - Metaphors as systems of thought: Fontenelle, Cyrano, Wilkins and Huygens.

Forgiveness is hard. But Jesus knows how much we need it. True forgiveness can be complicated because the pain of betrayal, loss, deception, and personal attack clings tightly to our emotions, memories, even our bodies. We may intend to forgive yet become stuck in our own mixed motives, others’ silence or anger, and the skewed stories we believe and tell about our lives. In The Ignatian Guide to Forgiveness, Marina McCoy delves into the principles of Ignatian spirituality and uses gentle honesty to lay out 10 steps toward forgiveness, including: • Sort out true desires • Honor anger while deepening compassion • Make friends with time • Create a new story • . . . and more. Each chapter offers stories, real-life steps to take, and a powerful prayer for healing Forgiveness is hard, but it’s also possible—with our “habits of mercy” and God’s abundant grace.

A global study of the psychospiritual body and its central role in the esoteric and spiritual traditions of the world • Explains the nature, purpose, and functions of the subtle body • Explores the role of the subtle body in such traditions as Alchemy, Ayurveda, Tantra, Qi Gong, and Yoga • Shows how the various layers of the subtle body provide a map for various levels of consciousness Ancient traditions of both the East and West have long maintained that the human being is a complex of material and nonmaterial systems, or energy bodies. The “subtle body” is an energetic, psychospiritual entity of several layers of increasing subtlety and metaphysical significance through which the aspirant seeks knowledge of the self and the nature of God. In many traditions, the component parts of the subtle body serve as a map of the different levels of consciousness. The practices and disciplines that evolved from an awareness and understanding of the subtle body, and how the material and nonmaterial work together, form a coherent system of psychospiritual transformation that is central to numerous and extremely diverse spiritual practices--including those of the Gnostics, Sufis, Native Americans, Vedic seers, Chinese, and Greeks. The subtle body plays an essential part in more recent traditions such as Anthroposophy and Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way and the cutting-edge science of Ervin Laszlo’s research into the Akashic field. But the benefits of understanding the role of the subtle energy body are not confined solely to the spiritual plane. The energetic bodies provide a coherent system of life-affirming principles and practices for the diagnosis and treatment of the whole person that is not only part of many traditional healing systems, such as Acupuncture and Ayurveda, but also is forming the basis for a synthesis of traditional and contemporary healing practices that could lay the foundation for the medicine of the future.

Vladimir Putin has emerged as one of the key leaders of the twenty-first century. However, he is also recognized as one of the most divisive. Abroad, his assertion of Russia's interests and critique of the western-dominated international system has brought him into conflict with Atlantic powers. Within Russia, he has balanced various factions within the elite intelligentsia alongside the wider support of Russian society. So what is the 'Putin paradox?' Richard Sakwa grapples with Putin's personal and political development on both the international political scene and within the domestic political landscape of Russia. This study historicizes the Putin paradox, through theoretical, historical and political analysis and in light of wider developments in Russian society. Richard Sakwa presents the Putin paradox as a unique regime type - balancing numerous contradictions - in order to adapt to its material environment while maintaining sufficient authority with which to shape it.

Over the past decades, the memory of the Holocaust has not only become a common cultural consciousness but also a cultural property shared by people all over the world. This collection brings together academics, critics and creative practitioners from the fields of Holocaust Studies, Literature, History, Media Studies, Creative Writing and German Studies to discuss contemporary trends in Holocaust commemoration and representation in literature, film, TV, the entertainment industry and social media. The essays in this trans-disciplinary collection debate how contemporary culture engages with the legacy of the Holocaust now that, 75 years on from the end of the Second World War, the number of actual survivors is dwindling. It engages with ongoing cultural debates in Holocaust Studies that have seen a development from, largely, testimonial presentations of the Holocaust to more fictional narratives both in literature and film. In addition to a number of chapters focusing in particular on literary trends in Holocaust representation, the collection also assesses other forms of cultural production surrounding the Holocaust, ranging from recent official memorialisation in Germany to Holocaust presentation in film, computer games and social media. The collection also highlights the contributions by creative practitioners such as writers and performers who use drama and the traditional art of storytelling in order to keep memories alive and pass them on to new generations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

Compelling account of how ideas of alien life have evolved for general readers, amateur astronomers and undergraduate students studying astrobiology.

For the last decade scholars have been questioning the idea that the Holocaust was not talked about in any way until well into the 1970s. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence is the first collection of authoritative, original scholarship to expose a serious misreading of the past on which, controversially, the claims for a ‘Holocaust industry’ rest. Taking an international approach this bold new book exposes the myth and opens the way for a sweeping reassessment of Jewish life in the postwar era, a life lived in the pervasive, shared awareness that Jews had narrowly survived a catastrophe that had engulfed humanity as a whole but claimed two-thirds of their number. The chapters include: an overview of the efforts by survivor historians and memoir writers to inform the world of the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe an evaluation of the work of survivor-historians and memoir writers new light on the Jewish historical commissions and the Jewish documentation centres studies of David Boder, a Russian born psychologist who recorded searing interviews with survivors, and the work of philosophers, social thinkers and theologians theatrical productions by survivors and the first films on the theme made in Hollywood how the Holocaust had an impact on the everyday life of Jews in the USA and a discussion of the different types, and meanings, of ‘silence’. A breakthrough volume in the debate about the ‘Myth of Silence’, this is a must for all students of Holocaust and genocide.

Ann Scholl revises the traditional understanding of the role of imagination and sensory perception in Descartes's Meditations. Traditionally, Cartesian scholars have focused primarily on sensory perception as the more significant of the two «special» modes of thought. In this work, Ann Scholl describes how a better understanding of Descartes's skepticism and his arguments for dualism are reached when imagination instead is understood as the more primary of the two special modes of thought. The result is a fresh reading and interpretation of Descartes's most influential work.

This book aims to show the many resources at our disposal for grappling with the Holocaust as the darkest occurrence of the twentieth century. These wide-ranging studies on philosophy, history, and literature address the way the Holocaust had led to the reconceptualization of the humanities. The scholarly approaches of Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot are examined critically, and the volume explores such poignant topics as violence, evil, and monuments.

Cutting edge feminist investigations of rationality.

Environmental writing is an increasingly popular literary genre, and a multifaceted genre at that. Recently dominated by works of 'new nature writing', environmental writing includes works of poetry and fiction about the world around us. In the last two decades, universities have begun to offer environmental writing modules and courses with the intention of teaching students skills in the field of writing inspired by the natural world. This book asks how students are being guided into writing about environments. Informed by independently conducted interviews with educators, and a review of existing pedagogical guides, it explores recurring instructions given to students for writing about the environment and compares these pedagogical approaches to the current theory and practice of ecocriticism by scholars such as Ursula Heise and Timothy Morton. Proposing a set of original pedagogical exercises influenced by ecocriticism, the book draws on a number of self-reflexive, environmentally-conscious poets, including Juliana Spahr, Jorie Graham and Les Murray, as creative and stimulating models for teachers and students.

Psychoanalytic encounters are filled with the unknowability of two unconscious minds meeting. Here one may forge a link that enables the process of meaning-making, or else it can become the space for destruction, perversion, evacuation, regression, and stasis. The area that lies between the mind of the analyst and that of the analysand is thus the liminal area of psychoanalysis - of growth, change, turbulence, as well as that of impasse, bastion, and failure. This latter could be what Bion meant by minus links. It seems that the primitive part of the mind is always looking for ways to evade psychic pain and emotional truth is always in peril. Analytic links are always fraught with danger. Minus links share with each other the quality of evading truth and therefore inhibiting emotional growth and the capacity to give meaning to experiences. Blind spots may be enabled by analytic allegiance to our particular schools, our inability to forge a technique in the face of the protomental apparatus which can breed arrogance, the complacencies of language, gaps between our theoretical allegiance and our technique, and, finally, all too often, our unwillingness and inability to get in touch with our true experience. Would it help to chronicle our quotidian failures? In these liminal moments, the links between analyst and analysand slide away from the emotional truth, rather than towards it. Nilofer Kaul presents these moments and explores the complex reasons behind them in a stunning debut work that questions the heart of analytic practice.

This book is designed to familiarise students with leading International Relations (IR) theories and their explanation of political events, phenomena, and processes which cross the territorial boundaries of the state. Thus, students will be exposed to the interplay between power, interest, ideas, identity, and resistance, in explaining continuity and change in international relations. Developed to provide students with the analytical tools and intellectual frameworks needed to understand the behaviour of different international actors in contemporary global affairs. This textbook responds to the challenges of a dynamic job market by assisting students to gain both thorough theoretical knowledge and training them to apply this knowledge to real world problems. In short, this textbook delivers: A comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the examination of national, regional and global trends in politics, economics and socio-cultural developments allowing students to understand: ¢ the practice and theory of contemporary international relations ¢ the politics, culture, history, and economies of different regions around the world ¢ the role played by international interactions, culture, and government in local, national, and global settings. Equipping students with the proficiency: ¢ to understand and interpret the dynamics, patterns, and issues of global affairs ¢ to know how to get more information about particular questions ¢ to evaluate that information independently and effectively. To these ends, the textbook provides a number of features that will appeal to students and avoids overwhelming students with chapters on topics which (in practice) are rarely on courses, while nonetheless providing a comprehensive overview of the field. Introduces students to the main debates, topics, and terms in the field and allows them to decide which they would like to focus on in their further studies.