The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. By Virginia Held. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 220p. $45. In her latest book, Virginia Held elaborates on themes from previously published articles to explicate and defend the ethics of care. For those unfamiliar with this well-developed tendency of feminist thought, she reviews its evolution from the 1980s writings of Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, and Nel Noddings to the more recent work of theorists including, among many others, Eva Kittay, Annette Baier, Joan Tronto, and Selma Sevenhuijsen. Held also underlines the differences between the ethics of care and dominant moral and political perspectives, including Kantian universalism, utilitarianism, liberal contract theory, and virtue theory. She proposes that care is, compared with justice, the more basic value, on the grounds that society can exist without the latter but not without the former. She recommends that men and women participate equally in care activities; that care infuse citizen as well as familial relations; and that society beat back the imperializing thrust of the market ethos and the conflict-mongering thrust of the militarized state to improve the well-being of children, the elderly, the sick and disabled, the community, culture, the environment, and deprived regions of the world.

The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global

Globalization - Social Theory and Global Culture

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Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition

of his career but also, and more significantly, claiming that here she is providing 'for the first time, a stylistic analysis of one of the American theatre's most fascinating practitioners.' That she has this justification depends, partly at least, on the fact that his plays and productions have commonly been regarded as belonging largely, if not indeed exclusively, to the realm of the popular stage, whereas she seeks to draw them within the orbit of those revolutionary endeavours which in divers European countries sought to establish a new theatrical 'naturalism' both in play composition and in play presentation the avant-garde activities to be found in the work of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Danish Theatre Royal, the French Theatre Libre, and the German Freie Blihne. That her endeavour is indeed fully warranted is demonstrated by the fact that when, for example, the Russian company and its companion organizations visited the United States various critics stressed their belief that its prod uctions 'had nothing new to teach Broadway.' Still more significant is the fact that Stanislavski himself put the seal of his approval on the activities of the American directorplaywright by actually making him an honorary member of the Moscow troupe. No doubt labels in themselves are of little or minor consequence, and no doubt on occasion they can prove misleading: yet it is of importance that we should teach ourselves how properly to interpret and evaluate outstanding achievements such as those manifested by such men as Belasco, and here Mrs Marker's study must be regarded as indeed a most valuable and accomplished textbook, or guidebook, call it which we will (ALLARDYCE NICOLL)

The great war and modern memory

As far back as we know, there have been individuals inca-pacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder". Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomemon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions, a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilising these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in a psychiatric unit specialising in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the tran-scripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.@@@Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory.

This book has been prompted by the contemporary interest in Trauma Studies, a field that has become increasingly significant in critical discourse since its appearance in the 1990s. Following the ‘ethical turn’ in the criticism of the 1980s, Trauma Studies emerged in the United States in the 1990s as an important critical trend. According to Roger Luckhurst, this was the period ‘when various lines of inquiry converged to make trauma a privileged critical category’ (2006, p. 497). From that moment onwards trauma theory has addressed both public and private questions that are pertinent for psychology, philosophy, ethics and aesthetics, and it combines resources from a number of critical schools, including Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism, New Historicism and deconstruction (Onega, 2009, p. 196). Going back to its origins, contemporary critics associated with Yale University in the 1990s, such as Cathy Caruth, Geoffrey Hartman and Shoshana Felman, attempted to adapt medical ideas on psychic traumatic processes to the analysis of narrative texts, thus launching Trauma Studies. Already in 1995, Hartman argued that ‘there is something very contemporary about Trauma Studies reflecting our sense that violence is coming ever nearer, like a storm — a storm that may have already moved into the core of our being’ (in Luckhurst, 2006, p. 503). In one of his subsequent articles ‘Trauma within the Limits of Literature’ (2003), Hartman explained that the main purpose of this discipline was to uncover the traumatic traces in the textual elements of literary works since, according to him, the effects of traumatic processes can be recognised in the narrative mechanisms employed in many different genres.

Trauma Narratives and Herstory

When addressing marginal experiences during the Second World War, the German occupation of the Channel Islands deserves pride of place, as very few writers have represented that liminal side of the conflict. One of these few writers is Libby Cone, who published War on the Margins in 2008, a historical novel set on Jersey during this occupation and whose main protagonist encounters various female characters resisting the occupation from a variety of marginal positions. Drawing from Rodriguez Magda’s distinction between “narratives of celebration” and “narratives of the limit”, the main claim behind this article is that liminality is a general recourse in transmodern fiction, but in Cone’s War on the Margins it also acts as a fruitful strategy to represent female bonds as promoters of empathy, resilience and resistance. First, this study will demonstrate how liminality works at a variety of levels and it will identify some of the specific features characterizing transmodern war narratives. Then, the female bonds represented will be examined to prove that War on the Margins relies on female solidarity when it comes to finding resilient attitudes to confront war. Finally, this article will elaborate on how Cone uses these liminal features to voice the difficult experiences that Jewish and non-Jewish women endured during the Second World War, echoing similar conflictive situations of other women in our transmodern era.

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/8/4/114/pdf

Liminal and Transmodern Female Voices at War: Resistant and Healing Female Bonds in Libby Cone’s War on the Margins (2008)

This article explores three works by British-Jewish women writers—Louise Kehoe’s In This Dark House, Lisa Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead and Linda Grant’s The People on the Street—in order to contex...

The Liminal Case of British-Jewish Women’s Autobiographical Writings

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been dominated by multifarious crises that have given way to individual and collective wounds resulting from environmental disasters, exile and migratory movements, war, terrorism, radicalism and other disturbing historical episodes. Our main contention is that trauma and/or excessive exposure to vulnerable situations can be relieved thanks to diverse narrative practices. Accordingly, we explore the field of Trauma Studies since its emergence to its current evolution towards the vulnerability paradigm, examining the different meanings of vulnerability not only from the perspective of the life sciences but also from the social sciences and its application to the humanities. Then, we move on to the notion of resilience and how it can help us articulate and/or move beyond trauma and vulnerability. In keeping with this, considering the ethical and political relationality between the self and other, we highlight one’s tendency to be affected by the other’s wounds and vulnerability as well as the inevitability of interdependency and interconnectedness between people and non-human entities. Thus, we explore the role of literature in giving voice to the voiceless and to unheard experiences of suffering as well as in representing the demise of the sovereign self and the rise of human and non-human interconnectedness after being exposed to traumatic or disastrous events, as represented in contemporary literatures in English.

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Introduction. Contemporary Literature in Times of Crisis and Vulnerability: Trauma, Demise of Sovereignty and Interconnectedness

This article aims at showing that extreme situations, such as wars, can reveal a common human vulnerability, which thus leads to a lack of sovereignty affecting all the agents implied in the traumatic episode. In Zina Rohan’s 2010 novel, The Small Book, this shared vulnerability crosses time and space boundaries by connecting coetaneous characters and their subsequent generations through inherited traumatic memories. These connections lead Rohan to blur the boundaries between what we may understand as victims and perpetrators of trauma. Thus, drawing on significant theories within the fields of trauma and memory studies as well as on conceptions about human vulnerability and interconnectedness, the main aim of this study is to analyse the key narrative mechanisms used by this British–Jewish author in order to represent the shared vulnerability and exposure to trauma that reigns during war and post-war times.

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Silvia Pellicer-Ortín

Papers

Trauma Narratives and Herstory

Liminal and Transmodern Female Voices at War: Resistant and Healing Female Bonds in Libby Cone’s War on the Margins (2008)

The Liminal Case of British-Jewish Women’s Autobiographical Writings

Introduction. Contemporary Literature in Times of Crisis and Vulnerability: Trauma, Demise of Sovereignty and Interconnectedness

Transgenerational Trauma, Shared Vulnerability and Interconnectedness in Zina Rohan’s The Small Book