Mythic Banality::Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt

The worst is that man has come to seem mindless.John Berger, “Francis Bacon and Walt Disney”The Zone of Interest is a film that has been shot at least twice: once through the lens ofits director, Jonathan Glazer, and then again through the lens of the 7 October Hamasattack and the subsequent war on Gaza. Few Holocaust films have spoken to our timesso directly. When Glazer made that connection implicit in his Oscar’s acceptancespeech – “Not to say ‘look what they did then’ – rather, ‘look what we do now’” – hetoo became part of the proxy cultural conflict that has raged from Berlin to New York.Throughout all of this, the ghost of Hannah Arendt has been a notable presence.Before its general release, Glazer said that while working on the film he was “constantlythinking” of Arendt’s description of how it was not radical evil but an outrageous mind-lessness that powered the industrialized genocide of the Holocaust. Whether judged anachingly timely masterpiece or denounced as “Holokitsch,” the film’s critics have followedGlazer’s lead and regularly evoked Arendt’s “banality of evil,” the phrase she used in hercontroversial reports on the 1961 trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann.1 In fact, whetherpeople love or loathe the film often seems to turn on whether they approve or disapproveArendt’s thesis. Or, indeed, of Arendt herself, for just as her debunking of the myth ofdemonic Nazis earned her public opprobrium, so too has Glazer’s Oscar’s speechturned him into a controversial figure in the very history he is asking us to understand.The Zone of Interest comes with a ready-made Arendtian imprimatur. I think this is also a problem

Engaging with Histories and Narratives of Displacement

In humanitarian contexts, poetry and creative approaches are often side-lined or presented as superfluous to the pressing needs that arise in emergency situations. A short-term emphasis on immediate needs has also led to creative approaches being side-lined, with such approaches often addressing narrative, memory, and history. However, as shown by the Refugee Hosts project’s research with nine local communities responding to displacement in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, creative approaches, such as poetry and writing workshops with communities, enable people to share past and ongoing experiences, and to build and sustain different forms of solidarity in the present and future. Creative approaches can develop insights into historical, political, religious, and communal ways of being that provide important counterweights to short-term decision making. Finding ways to engage with communities through creative approaches helps to make space for the articulation of memories and narratives that better inform interventions in the short and long-term. Creative writing, historical narratives and the arts allow practitioners to better acknowledge the multi-layered, historical, and emotional complexity that exists in displacement contexts and offers approaches that support community dialogue. This Research Brief calls for humanitarian practitioners to meaningfully engage with creative writing, history and the arts when working in displacement-affected contexts

THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT : ENGLISH PSYCHOANALYSIS, LITERATURE AND CRITICISM FROM THE 1920S TO WORLD WAR TWO.

PhDWhereas recent studies of psychoanalysis and modernism have tended to 'translate' literature through contemporary French psychoanalytic thought, this dissertation opens up a historical dialogue between English psychoanalysis, modernist writing, art criticism and literary criticism. I argue that a shared anxiety about the redemptive role of art in a period which both writers and analysts characterise as marked by 'unsublimated' drives towards destruction, is coupled with an increasing concern with the precariousness of the frontier between self and culture, and between art and the social and political ideologies upon which culture rests. This double movement is reflected in the structure of the dissertation which begins with a comparison of attempts to make a moral and~aesthetic out of 'the destructive element' by I.A. Richards and Melanie Klein, and ends with Marion Milner's and Stevie Smith's speculations on the complicity between the violence of the self and the violence of the outside world in the thirties. Other writers discussed include W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf, as well as Ella Freeman Sharpe, Paula Heimann, Hanna Segal and Adrian Stokes.Research Grant- Kingston Universit