The Politics of Fieldwork: Research in an American Concentration Camp Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 132-134
Author(s):  
Tetsuden Kashima
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp

Beckett's Watt and Monastic Tradition

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-109
Author(s):  
Kristen Marangoni
Keyword(s):  
Boarding School ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Geometric Shapes ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Book Of Kells ◽  
The Face ◽  
Choral Arrangements ◽  
Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

The enigmatic setting of Beckett's novel Watt has been compared to places as diverse as an insane asylum, a boarding school, a womb, and a concentration camp. Watt's experience at Knott's house does seem suggestive of all of these, and yet it may more readily conform to the setting of a monastery. The novel is filled with chants, meditations, choral arrangements, hierarchical classifications, and even silence, all highly evocative of a monastic lifestyle. Some of Watt's dialogue (such as his requests for forgiveness or reflections on the nature of mankind) further echoes various Catholic liturgies. Watt finds little solace in these activities, however. He feels that they are largely rote and purposeless as they are focused on Knott, a figure who in many ways defies linguistic description and physical know-ability. Watt's meditations and rituals become, then, empty catechisms without answers, something that is reflected in the extreme difficulty that Watt has communicating. In the face of linguistic and liturgical instability, the Watt notebooks present a counter reading that can be found in the thousand plus doodles that line its pages. The drawings reinforce as well as subvert their textual counterpart, and they function in many ways as the images in medieval illuminated manuscripts. The doodles in Watt often take the form of decorative letters, elaborate marginal drawings, and depictions of a variety of people and animals, and many of its doodles offer uncanny resemblances in form or theme to those in illuminated manuscripts like The Book of Kells. Doodles of saints, monks, crosses, and scribes even give an occasional pictorial nod to the monastic setting in which illuminated manuscripts were usually produced (and remind us of the monastic conditions in which Beckett found himself writing much of Watt). Beckett's doodles not only channel this medium of illuminated manuscripts, they also modernize its application. Instead of neat geometric shapes extending down the page, his geometric doodle sequences are often abstracted, fragmented, and nonlinear. Beckett also occasionally modernized the content of illuminated manuscripts: instead of the traditional sacramental communion table filled with candles, bread and wine, Beckett doodles a science lab table where Bunsen burners replaces candles and wine glasses function as beakers. It is through these modernized images that Watt attempts to draw contemporary relevance from a classic art form and to restore (at least partial) meaning to rote traditions.

“Floating Melodies and Memories” of the Terezín Memorial

Transfers ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-141
Author(s):  
Chia-ling Lai
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Czech Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Dark Tourism ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Will To Live ◽  
Worldwide Phenomenon ◽  
The Will ◽  
Musical Heritage

As Andrea Huyssen observes, since the 1990s the preservation of Holocaust heritage has become a worldwide phenomenon, and this “difficult heritage” has also led to the rise of “dark tourism.” Neither as sensationally traumatic as Auschwitz’s termination concentration camp in Poland nor as aesthetic as the forms of many modern Jewish museums in Germany and the United States, the Terezín Memorial in the Czech Republic provides a different way to present memorials of atrocity: it juxtaposes the original deadly site with the musical heritage that shows the will to live.

“It all boils down to a question of words”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McNaughton
Keyword(s):  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Paul Ricœur ◽  
Authoritarian Politics ◽  
Hayden White

The Unnamable confronts inherited narrative and linguistic forms with the incommensurability of recent genocide. Initially, the book performs this inadequacy by confronting novel tropes with distorted images cribbed from memoirs of Mauthausen concentration camp. Then it updates surrealist treatments of Parisian abattoirs, asking whether industrialized slaughter is also the sign and fulfillment of modern genocide. The Unnamable also confuses literary production and the biopolitical aspirations of authoritarian politics: Beckett’s narrator writes from a conviction that language can become wholly performative and has the capacity to incarnate and to kill. The narrator attempts to deconstruct language, but doing so ironically transcends literary and philosophical problems to reveal historiographical problems as well, the missing voices of those killed without trace. The chapter ends with a theoretical coda that productively contextualizes Beckett’s strategy with historiographical debate about narrative and genocide by Paul Ricoeur, Giorgio Agamben, Hayden White, and others.

Ravensbruck: An Eyewitness Account of a Women's Concentration Camp.

1977 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 339
Author(s):  
Nancy R. Chiswick ◽  
Germaine Tillion ◽  
Gerald Sotterwhite
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Eyewitness Account

Geochemical assessment of soils in the German Nazi concentration camp in Stutthof (Northern Poland)

2015 ◽  
Vol 61 (sup1) ◽  
pp. 47-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Przemysław Charzyński ◽  
Maciej Markiewicz ◽  
Magdalena Majorek ◽  
Renata Bednarek
Keyword(s):  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Nazi Concentration Camp ◽  
Northern Poland ◽  
Geochemical Assessment

scholarly journals The Traumatic Syndrome

1972 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 391-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hector Warnes
Keyword(s):  
Life Style ◽  
Traumatic Event ◽  
The Other ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Dynamic Pattern ◽  
Traumatic Neurosis ◽  
Concentration Camp Survivors ◽  
Characteristic Features

This paper demonstrates both the similarities and the differences between concentration camp survivors and those suffering from other forms of psychiatric reactions resulting from trauma. In the former the systematic degradation, humiliation and persecution over a prolonged period of time, along with a sense of hopelessness and/or helplessness are characteristic features. Found at the other extreme of the spectrum is the acute traumatic event occurring in civil life and resulting in a classical traumatic neurosis but not leading to a total transformation of personality and life style. Between these two forms of psychiatric reactions there are various pathogenetic and pathoplastic mechanisms, sometimes overlapping but showing the underlying dynamic pattern of survival threat.

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