Buffy the vampire slayer: what being Jewish has to do with it

This article examines the whiteness in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The author argues that the show’s overwhelming whiteness is a product of a generalized white anxiety about the numerical loss of white dominance across the United States and, in particular, in California. The article goes on to think through the role that Jewishness plays in the program, discussing the relationship between the apparently Anglo-American Buffy, played by a Jewish actor, and her sidekick, Willow, who is characterized as Jewish but is played by a non-Jewish actor. The evil master in the first series is given Nazi characteristics and the destruction that he wants to inflict carries connotations of the Holocaust. Structurally, Buffy is produced as the Jew who saves the United States from this demonic destruction. In this traumatic renarrativising, the Holocaust comes to stand for the white-experienced crisis of the loss of white supremacy in the United States. With this reading we can begin to understand the show’s popularity among early adult, predominantly white Americans

Constructing Memory through Television in Argentina

La televisión representa el pasado reciente de la Argentina a través de vínculos específicos con la memoria social: como un “emprendedor de la memoria” definiendo las agendas públicas, como un vehículo de transmisión intergeneracional sobre el pasado y como un creador de significados por medio de imágenes, sonidos y palabras, esto es, un “escenario para la memoria”. Un análisis de los vínculos entre televisión y memorias, construido alrededor de la desaparición forzada de personas durante la dictadura militar de 1976 a 1983, revela la manera compleja en la cual los obstáculos para relatar ese periodo trágico se combinan con el intento de vender un producto y entretener al espectador.Television represents Argentina’s recent past through three specific links with social memory: as an “entrepreneur of memory,” shaping public agendas, as a vehicle of intergenerational transmission of past events, and as a creator of meaning through images, sounds, and words, a “stage for memory”. An analysis in terms of the links between television and the memories constructed around the forced disappearance of persons during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship reveals the complex way in which the obstacles when narrating an extreme experience are combined with the attempt to sell a product and entertain the spectator.Fil: Feld, Claudia Viviana. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Centro de Investigaciones Sociales. Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social. Centro de Investigaciones Sociales; Argentin

Narrativa

As histórias, como vias de compreensão da condição humana, têm preocupado a Filosofia desde Aristóteles. O artigo, baseado em uma visão afirmativa da narratividade (Ricoeur, Rorty e MacIntyre), elabora a ideia de que a resistência à narratividade em nome de modelos redutores de cientificismo deverá ceder à compreensão de que a verdade histórica tanto é propriedade do chamado conhecimento objetivo, como do conhecimento narrativo. Num diálogo crítico entre a poética aristotélica e leituras hermenêuticas contemporâneas, discute as relações entre verdade narrativa e memória; ficção e história; catarse e testemunho; identidade narrativa e responsabilidade moral. Considerando as possibilidades de narrativa interativa e não-linear da era digital, a narrativa é considerada um convite à responsividade ética e poética

Lo sterminio degli ebrei. Tra storia e memoria

Il volume raccoglie alcuni dei principali scritti di metodo dello storico del nazismo Saul Friedlander attorno ai temi della rappresentazione storica e memoria della Shoah, del ruolo delle testimonianze delle vittime e dell'atteggiamento dello storico e della sua soggettività nella ricostruzione di vicende di straordinaria violen

To 'bear witness where witness needs to be borne': Diary writing and the Holocaust, 1939--1945.

This dissertation examines Jewish diarists' attempts to comprehend the unimaginable genocide as it unfolded around them and of the meaning of their own lives in this radically altered world. It explores the function and meaning of diary writing within Jews' meaning-making struggles. Alternating between close analyses of individual diaries and larger thematic perspectives, it examines the different impulses---historical, theological, familial, and ethical---that compelled individuals to record their experiences. Moreover, it details how Jews' goals for their diaries changed over time, in response to mounting knowledge about the ensuing extermination. For most Jews, simply keeping a diary in the first years of the war demonstrated their participation in a widespread European trend, as well as their belief that their wartime experiences would be familiar and thus narratable. After 1942, however, when many diarists began to hear news of mass killings and extermination or had first-hand experience of the killings, they shifted their narrative frameworks. Thus, this study marks out what was particular to Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust as well as how it connected to the broader European histories of diary writing, of reading, of subjectivity, and of the family.Focusing largely on unpublished diaries, this study adds a wide range of victims' voices to Holocaust historiography, including those of Jews in hiding in Poland and little-known diarists from Germany and France. Beyond unearthing new individual stories, this dissertation creates new ways of categorizing Jewish wartime experiences based on their strategies of interpretation. Looking at the variety of ways that Jews attempted to make sense of the unimaginable gives us an alternative means of categorizing Jewish experiences from this period, one which highlights both the shared experience of being a Jew under Nazi occupation---as meaning-makers rather than passive victims---and the diversity of modern European Jewry in the mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, this study reveals the genesis of issues that would become central to postwar thought, including the limits of representation, the relationship of memory to history, the concept of a fragmented self, the potential impossibility of mourning trauma, and the moral fallibility of Western science and democracy.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 2003.School code: 0031