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"Hersey, John"
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IMAGES OF THE YEAR
Freeman Dyson, Alondra Nelson, Emilie Savage-Smith, Ann Pettifor, Callum Roberts, Ismail Serageldin and Chikwe Ihekweazu chose science-inflected volumes - on the often-forgotten lessons of Hiroshima, the rise of unregulated markets, the ubiquity of plastic, mapping the eleventh-century world, and more. ALONDRA NELSON THE RETURN OF EUGENICS Some three decades ago, as global concern was tuned to the reunification of Germany, Nelson Mandela's release from a South African prison and the launch of the Human Genome Project, sociologist Troy Duster published a quiet but prescient primer for the dawning age of DNA. In this world, genetic explanations are offered for issues better explained by politics and social structure, such as inequality; the impact of genetic screening programmes depends on the resources of patients; and the state and businesses fund genetic testing, assembling large caches of personal data, with high stakes for the medical and criminal-justice systems. (The mandatory sampling and analysing of DNA from certain criminal suspects in many US jurisdictions is a case in point, as is genomic surveillance in China.) It might involve increasing what was tested, from acute medical conditions to social phenomena such as 'educational attainment'.
Journal Article
A book for our time, from all time
Freeman Dyson, Alondra Nelson, Emilie Savage-Smith, Ann Pettifor, Callum Roberts, Ismail Serageldin and Chikwe Ihekweazu chose science-inflected volumes - on the often-forgotten lessons of Hiroshima, the rise of unregulated markets, the ubiquity of plastic, mapping the eleventh-century world, and more. ALONDRA NELSON THE RETURN OF EUGENICS Some three decades ago, as global concern was tuned to the reunification of Germany, Nelson Mandela's release from a South African prison and the launch of the Human Genome Project, sociologist Troy Duster published a quiet but prescient primer for the dawning age of DNA. In this world, genetic explanations are offered for issues better explained by politics and social structure, such as inequality; the impact of genetic screening programmes depends on the resources of patients; and the state and businesses fund genetic testing, assembling large caches of personal data, with high stakes for the medical and criminal-justice systems. (The mandatory sampling and analysing of DNA from certain criminal suspects in many US jurisdictions is a case in point, as is genomic surveillance in China.) It might involve increasing what was tested, from acute medical conditions to social phenomena such as 'educational attainment'.
Journal Article
Fiction's Archive: Authenticity, Ethnography, and Philosemitism in John Hersey's The Wall
In 1950, John Hersey, a Pulitzer prize--winning American author, published The Wall, an immediate best seller and one of the first English-language novels of the Holocaust. Quickly superseded by literature written by Jewish survivors, The Wall nonetheless deserves reconsideration as a major work of Jewish ethnography that introduced the English-reading public to Polish Jewish culture in the immediate postwar years. This article gauges the public's adoring and grateful reaction to The Wall through an analysis of the scores of letters penned to Hersey while also examining the American English- and Yiddish-language presses' criticism of Hersey's novel. The book's success was assured by Hersey's sensitive interlocution into a culture not his own, illustrating the significance of the author's gentile provenance and philosemitism in the postwar years. Key words: The Wall, Holocaust representation, John Hersey, philosemitism, Warsaw Ghetto uprising
Journal Article
Bodies of Memory
Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma, even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories. Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural productions in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period.
Japanese war experiences were often described through narrative devices that downplayed the war's disruptive effects on Japan's history. Rather than treat these narratives as obstacles to historical inquiry, Igarashi reads them along with counter-narratives that attempted to register the original impact of the war. He traces the tensions between remembering and forgetting by focusing on the body as the central site for Japan's production of the past. This approach leads to fascinating discussions of such diverse topics as the use of the atomic bomb, hygiene policies under the U.S. occupation, the monstrous body of Godzilla, the first Western professional wrestling matches in Japan, the transformation of Tokyo and the athletic body for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the writer Yukio Mishima's dramatic suicide, while providing a fresh critical perspective on the war legacy of Japan.
eBook
“So Beautiful That Mortal… Eyes Can’t Take It”: How Postmodernism Shows Us the Function of the Beautiful in the Landscape of the Traumatic
In her 2010 article “Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in the Era of Trauma”, Griselda Pollock lamented the aperture between psychology, particularly that of PTSD, and esthetics in the search to bear witness to traumatic experience. This article explores the gray area that exists when the esthetic and the traumatic converge, arguing that such areas exist not only as direct representations of the difficulty of narrativizing trauma as described by such theorists as Cathy Caruth, Onno van der Hart, and Bessel van der Kolk, but also simultaneously as windows into the moments of what Dominick LaCapra calls “the sublime object of endless melancholia and impossible mourning”. Postmodernism is argued to be the organic choice of voicing traumatic retellings, and close readings of John Hersey’s proto-postmodern Hiroshima (1946), Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1992), and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) work to highlight the intersections of trauma, postmodern literature, and esthetics; or, in Wallace’s case, theoretical discussions of traumatic tropes as facilitated by the postmodern tradition. In drawing attention to this tripartite convergence, this article hopes to continue in the vein of scholarship that reaffirms the need for evermore research in the field of trauma studies as well as substantiate a claim of the heightened importance of postmodern literature in the 21st century—an epoch indelibly marked by trauma, as noted by Pollock.
Journal Article
The New Heroism
Kathryn Bigelow, director of the academy-award winning film The Hurt Locker (2008), ponders the current idea of heroism from the soldier's perspective: \"War's dirty little secret is that some men love it. (War Imagined xii) Modris Eksteins argues that this myth replaced the public's memory of the war itself. Since Remarque's view of the war was shared by so many, readers accepted it as the \"truth\" about the war: \"The novel became enormously successful not because it was an accurate expression of the front-line soldier's war experience, but because it was a passionate evocation of current public feeling, not so much even about the war as about existence in general in 1929\" (362). [...]if the World War I analogue is intended to diminish Marrow's heroism by showing that it is more individualist than patriotic, the parallel has the opposite effect. Since Yeats allows his speaker the self-awareness that Marrow lacks, the analogy lends Marrow the stature of the reflective Irish airman. Web. http://books.google.com/books?id=CUgJAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=ed mund+burke+on+the+sublime&hl=en&sa=X&ei=a6fJUsayD-nWyQHskYEY&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA# v=onepage&q=edmund%20burke%20on%20the%20sublime&f=false Cohen, Milton A. \"Fatal Symbiosis: Modernism and World War I.\" War, Literature, and the Arts 8 (1996): 1-46.
Journal Article
The Middle Ground
Mueller reflects on his friendship with writer John Hersey and his wife Barbara. He acknowledges that his not a prolific writer, though writing is central to the life he had dreamed for himself. He had compared himself to others, John Hersey and his peers. Those in the Hersey's social circle weren't perfect, and yet to him they seemed so.
Journal Article
Becoming \More Human\: From the Drafts of \Invisible Man\ to \Three Days Before the Shooting...\
Ralph Ellison’s “Hickman Novel”—upon which Three Days Before the Shooting… is based—reveals that the Popular Front-era radicalism largely effaced from Invisible Man continued to fuel Ellison’s imagination. Although he had established his bona fides as a cold warrior in Invisible Man , Ellison retained certain leftist ideas and insights that both inspired and obstructed his attempts to pull together his second novel. His fidelity to a novelistic timeline anchored in the Jim Crow, the Depression, and the early civil rights movement would be disrupted by the felt need to draw in international antifascist activism during World War II.
Journal Article