Germans as Victims

Helmut Schmitz and Annette Seidel-Arpaci, eds, Narratives of Trauma: Discourses of German Wartime Suffering in National and International Perspective (Rodopi, 2011) I must admit, I haven't read this yet, but I find the concept interesting. As the promotional blurb has it, 'The focus of this interdisciplinary volume is both on the historical roots o…

Suffering in the Modern World #2: Those who live by the sword…

Another political post, that has nothing (much) to do with the seventeenth century (except, perhaps, insofar as 'plus ça change...'). I'm not planning to make a habit of posts like these - I just want to get it off my chest! I don't think I have ever been so upset by a news story as…

Suffering in the Modern World #1: Torture in the USA

I'm sorry, but this post can hardly avoid being political! The degree of cruelty and sheer nastiness that one finds in seventeenth-century discourse is connected, in part, with the extent to which pain was publicly inflicted. Whole families might gather to enjoy the spectacle of a bear being tormented by dogs, a public flogging, or…

Watching the suffering of others

A public domain thesis on the effect of witnessing scenes of people in distant places suffering in the media:Maria Kyriakidou, Watching the Pain of Others: Audience Discourses of Distant Suffering in Greece. This thesis can also be viewed here.…