Rampant structural inequality exists across human societies, exerting a powerful influence on the health of individuals around the globe. Differential access to – and variation in – material wealth contributes greatly to this imbalance. Intergenerational transfer of material wealth can advantage some individuals over less fortunate individuals, shaping divergent destinies and creating a hierarchy of privilege. This concept is familiar within the context of human economic and social systems, but we argue that privilege is not a uniquely human phenomenon. Rather, privilege has evolved multiple times and its phylogenetic reach may be startlingly widespread across the Tree of Life, raising the provocative possibility that comparative study of privilege may offer insights leading to effective strategies countering inequality in human societies.
The aim of this article is to apply the concept of synergy to the workings of memory in Miller's Landscape of Farewell (2007) by focusing on the relationship between its two main characters, Max Otto, a German professor of history, and Dougald Gnapun, an Aboriginal elder. It does so with a view to analysing the way in which fiction can weave connections between different histories of violence-in this case the Holocaust and the colonisation of Australia-while simultaneously pointing to the risks of downplaying the specificities of each case. Both men are burdened by traumatic memories of past atrocities: for Max it is his father's complicity in the crimes of Nazism, while for Dougald it is the 1861 Cullin-la-Ringo massacre of white settlers, allegedly led by his great-grandfather. Max and Dougald meet through Vita McLelland, a young Aboriginal academic visiting Hamburg, who invites Max to a conference at the University of Sydney and then to visit her uncle Dougald in Queensland so that the professor can learn about the history of Australia's indigenous people. Though far from one another in terms of geographical and cultural background, a close friendship develops between these two men whose only initial link is their being descendants of perpetrators. I argue that by confronting the joint legacies of the Holocaust and colonialism through Max and Dougald's synergistic and transformative friendship, and by placing their stories/memories in a broader transnational and transhistorical context, Miller's fictional recreation of these historical events engages with the complex relationship between victimisers and victims, perpetrators and descendants, history and fiction, remembrance and appropriation, which, as in the case of Max and Douglad, suggests the possibility of reconciliation with, and a letting go, of traumatic pasts.
This article focuses on Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room (2001), which I place in the context of what Froma I. Zeitlin (2006) regards as an emerging trend in Holocaust literature: fictional stories that move away from the victims and focus instead on the victimisers, as well as on the impact and legacy of the Nazi period on average Germans. The Dark Room consists of three independent but related stories, entitled after each German protagonist, and taking place in Germany at different moments of the 20th century. It is my aim to analyse the themes that connect these three stories -loss, guilt, shame, secrets and deception, traumatic awakenings and the fall from innocence, the crisis of identity, etc.-and to relate them to the motif already suggested by the work's title: photography. Pictures recur insistently throughout the book's pages and, like the past, they constitute a spectral presence in Seiffert's novella triptych, where photographs emerge as a vehicle for exploring the problems posed by photographic evidence. Thus, I argue, the thread that ultimately weaves the stories together has to do with each protagonist's negative epiphany, that is to say, his/her painful discovery that, in spite of all that a picture can be said to capture or show, the truth turns out to be disturbingly absent, lying in an unreachable elsewhere, always beyond the frame.While narratives of loss, oppression and trauma are by no means new, there is no denying that the particular dedication of the humanities to these issues has reached a new quality from the 1990s onwards. As the concept of trauma has gradually travelled
The present article analyses J. L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country (1980) in the light of an approach to traumatic experience as paradoxically relating destructiveness and survival. This view of trauma – already present in Freud and further elaborated in more recent theories like Cathy Caruth’s – accentuates the possibility of constructing a new story that bears witness not only to the shattering effects of trauma but also to a departure from it. From this perspective, the author deals first with the role of art as a survival aid to the novel’s traumatised protagonist, explaining how his restoration of a medieval mural helps him work through his troubled memories of the Great War. Repetitions and doublings link the two central characters, their discoveries and their recovery, creating layers of meaning that, it is argued, call for a ‘palimpsestuous’ reading, in Sarah Dillon’s sense of the term. The author then focuses on the regenerative power of nature in the novel, relating its use of the pastoral to the frequent recourse to it in Great War literature, and interpreting Carr’s text in line with critical approaches that reject escapism as the main trait of the pastoral mode. Finally, the protagonist’s retrospective narration is discussed as a creative act that is also an aid to the survival of the self.1
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