Postmodern Phenomenon Research Articles

Skazane na melancholię. O emocjach we współczesnej chorwackiej poezji kobiecej

The aim of the study is to answer the question what the postmodern melancholy is and how it manifests itself through emotions in contemporary works of selected Croatian poets: Božica Zoko, Marijana Radmilovic and Tea Gikic. The analysis of poems focused on the theme of body language and metaphors associated with physicality, which are culturally consistent way of ex pressing melancholy. Postmodern phenomena, such as consumerism, media development, twilight of grand narratives, transformation of the aesthetics of the text, expansion of popular culture or value system instability, which create a melancholic anxiety. Characteristics of postmodern melancholy language have been analyzed which is also the language of women’s depression. The theme, most often undertaken by poets, turned out to be the body and language.

O Paraíso em Goiás: pioneirismo místico na Chapada dos Veadeiros

A Chapada dos Veadeiros, em sua vertente situada no município de Alto Paraíso de Goiás, possui várias atrações turísticas, tais como a “aura mística” que perpassa a sua localização, a exuberante natureza e a presença dos cristais de quartzo. Busca-se compreender, nesse sentido, de que forma o município recebeu seus primeiros núcleos populacionais, até a atração dos grupos denominados místicos ou esotéricos, fenômeno característico da pós-modernidade, período marcado pela pluralização e desinstitucionalização da religiosidade. A metodologia utilizada baseia-se em diálogos com teóricos que tratam do “reencantamento do mundo”, na análise histórica das pioneiras ocupações do território de Alto Paraíso e da chegada dos grupos esotéricos após a construção de Brasília.Palavras chave: Alto Paraíso; Esoterismo; Reencantamento do Mundo; Pós-modernidade.

Pynchon’s California ed. by Scott McClintock, John Miller (review)

Reviewed by: Pynchon’s California ed. by Scott McClintock, John Miller Casey Shoop Scott McClintock and John Miller, eds., Pynchon’s California. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014. 228pp. Paper, $45; e-book, $45. As the proverbial “end” of the nation’s manifest destiny, California has long been overdetermined in the historical imagination: from the land of milk and honey to the land of millenarian last hours. No writer is perhaps more attuned to this ambivalent destiny than Thomas Pynchon, whose novels have repeatedly field-tested its prospects and possibilities. To date he has situated three novels in that fertile territory (The Crying of Lot 49 [1966], Vineland [1990], and Inherent Vice [2009]) and brought two others to rest there (Gravity’s Rainbow [1973] and Against the Day [2006]). The publication of Scott McClintock and John Miller’s edited collection of essays is thus an overdue and much-needed critical exploration of this connection between Pynchon and the place where history is so often presumed to end, for better or worse. Taken together, the essays argue for what Margaret Lynd in the volume’s lead essay calls the “situated knowledges” of Pynchon’s California fiction over against what the editors see as the prevalent critical tendency to read “in the microcosm of California any ‘totalizing’ order of domination by postmodern, late ‘Capital’” (9). The essays demonstrate a wide-ranging and vital attention to the specific historical and regional contexts of Pynchon’s engagement with California. Hanjo Berressem, for example, offers a free-spirited reading of the state’s peculiar ecology in the “California trilogy.” Bill Millard insightfully tracks the sordid political history of land use and real estate through Inherent Vice, while Stephen Hock pursues the emblematic modernity of roads and freeways in Pynchon’s novels toward their ultimate expression in the California highway system. And Lynd finds in the smaller, more character-driven plots of the California novels a modicum of “situated hope” and agency against the rectilinear course of historical catastrophe that propels [End Page 260] Pynchon’s larger world-historical novels (22). In a manner that both complements and diverges from the concerns of those contrapuntal epics, Pynchon’s California makes a persuasive case for the intimacy of historical experience in the California trilogy (the 1960s through the 1980s), the felt-sense of an epoch lived through in tones both promissory and elegiac. At the same time, this attention to the “local, regionally specific and ‘situated’ features of Pynchon’s California fictions” has its limits (9). Writing about California is challenging precisely because of the perceived conflict between the regional and historical specificities of place on the one hand, and the allegorical leveraging of that place into national and international meanings that far exceed it on the other. Rather than privileging one side of this opposition, Pynchon’s California would have benefited from a more dialectical account of the connections between the local and the global that California stages in the period Pynchon’s novels traverse. Posing questions about the relationship between periodization and place in his work makes this need clear: how do Pynchon’s novels imagine the growth of the California information economy that so deeply altered the US labor market? What is the link between Pynchon’s fascination with Hollywood image-culture and the dream-life of capitalism more generally? How does the California rise of Reaganism that so preoccupies Pynchon augur a crisis of faith for the legacy of sixties radicalism not only at Berkeley but also around the world? How do Pynchon’s California novels help us reconceptualize the global phenomenon of postmodernism, a concept that seems so indelibly Californian in its articulation? On this last question, the editors are loath to rehearse the “by now all-too-familiar portrayal of California as a postmodern space of superficiality” and eager to “offer an alternative to the construction of Pynchon as postmodern ironist” (8, 9). I see this reduction of postmodernism to an aesthetic category as something of a lost opportunity for Pynchon’s California: when postmodernism is conceptualized as a periodizing term for the postwar economic and cultural transformations in the capitalist world-system, as in the influential accounts of Fredric...

‘‘Casuals’ culture. Bricolage and consumerism in football supporters’ culture. Case study – Dinamo Bucharest Ultras’

‘Casuals’ culture can be perceived as a postmodern phenomenon, which modifies and changes the football supporter culture in a fully blown consumerist era, where symbol movement is faster every day and implies minimal costs. Throughout this article, I attempted to prove the existence of a certain type of ‘bricolage’, created by recycling a set of brands, symbolically redefined by ultras groups. At the same time, the internalization of the ‘casuals’ movement by Romanian fanatical supporters also denotes the emergence of strong elements of hyper-consumerist culture, of differentiation and status, both at the level of individuals in the groups, as well as at the level of rival supporters groups. ‘Casuals’ style naturally matches the entrance of football and of the culture of supporting a team into postmodernity.

Multicultural Challenges: Teaching Contemporary American Literature for Russian Philological Students

Contemporary American literature is taught in Russian universities for philological students of different majors, but the methodical basis is still poor. The first fundamental research on Multiculturalism in American literature in Russia was made by M. Tlostanova. Her book The Multicultural Debate and American Fiction of the Late 20th Century was published in 2000. Since 14 years have passed, some statements made there are not urgent today. The only manual entitled The US Multicultural Novel was published by E. Butenina in 2013, but it doesn’t cover all the necessary issues of the problem. Consequently, we as professors need a certain basis for teaching contemporary multicultural fiction. Professors face numerous challenges connected with multicultural paradigm as a part of the postmodern perception of the world. For effective teaching, it is necessary to take into consideration the students’ knowledge and background. We chose the method of direct questioning and offered the students several questions about Multiculturalism and Postmodernism, both in the most general and literary meanings. The students have not studied any of contemporary literature, Postmodernism or Multiculturalism, yet and have no academic knowledge about them. Analyzing the answers we saw that, however, the cultural phenomena of Multiculturalism and Postmodernism are familiar to the students, they can hardly explain how they can be referred to literature. Carrying out this research, we believed that it would help us in teaching Multicultural American Literature in the future. Thus, we made important conclusions and gave the recommendations for the professors dealing with the subject.

Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, and Utopia as Process in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games : “It’s the First Gift That’s Always the Hardest to Pay Back”

Beginning with the observation that young adult literature has been the subject of ethical criticism from multiple sides of the ideological spectrum and drawing on Roberta Seelinger Trites’s argument that this body of work is a postmodern phenomenon, this article interrogates whether young adult literature is a morally compromised genre from the start or whether there is not a morally constructive framework through which young adult novels might be viewed productively. Using the first novel of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy as a case study, this paper proposes a heuristic that borrows from the postmodern (or “liquid modern”) ethics of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman, who interprets Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics of ethics” as a descriptive, phenomenological, existential exercise, rejects absolutes in favour of process and an emphasis on the urge to “be-for” the Other. Through the lens of Bauman’s ethics, this paper analyzes Katniss Everdeen’s journey as a processual one, toward the end of an active moral urge.

Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, and Utopia as Process in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games: “It’s the First Gift That’s Always the Hardest to Pay Back”

Beginning with the observation that young adult literature has been the subject of ethical criticism from multiple sides of the ideological spectrum and drawing on Roberta Seelinger Trites’s argument that this body of work is a postmodern phenomenon, this article interrogates whether young adult literature is a morally compromised genre from the start or whether there is not a morally constructive framework through which young adult novels might be viewed productively. Using the first novel of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy as a case study, this paper proposes a heuristic that borrows from the postmodern (or “liquid modern”) ethics of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman, who interprets Emmanuel Levinas’s “ethics of ethics” as a descriptive, phenomenological, existential exercise, rejects absolutes in favour of process and an emphasis on the urge to “be-for” the Other. Through the lens of Bauman’s ethics, this paper analyzes Katniss Everdeen’s journey as a processual one, toward the end of an active moral urge.

Актуализация феномена сакрального в ситуации кризиса современной культуры

The article presents an analysis of the processes of resacralization occurring in culture and art in parallel with the desacralization, which is the ontologicalfoundation of modern culture and postmodern art and has a worldview character, because the lack of spirituality in modern art and culture, spiritual and essential desolation of grounds of cultural sphere in general is associated on our view with the loss of the transcendent beginning or foundations that characterized all previous traditional classical culture and aesthetics. It was found that the resacralization takes different forms, leading to different types of shamanism (real and virtual) and sacralization of materiality, cruelty, somatic and libidinal phenomena in art, through which a person can go beyond their being, which leads to, respectively, shamanism in art, materialism, physicality, sexuality, violence in mass-to-date art, electronic digital media and specific artistic search and expressions in virtual art. Revealed that the process of resacralization is made possible by the fact that at the heart of the sacred there are deep archetypes of human consciousness, which define and interchange the sacred. However, modern culture has become a sacredly empty simulacrum, a shell without a high spiritual content, form and meaning, not presenting high and spiritual content, but rather suggesting low-lying values, because it is filled by the meanings and contents which have become relevant in the modern era. It is concluded that modern art makes sacred predominantly everyday and even baser postmodern phenomena and trends of today.

Women Heroines of Torah Study as Portrayed by Rabbi Joseph Mesas in <em>Naḥalat Avot</em>

Positive attitudes towards in-depth study of Torah by women are widely regarded as a post-modern feminist phenomenon. It is therefore of great interest to see earlier sources composed in a traditional milieu that express deep admiration for women choosing as their life’s vocation immersion in the highest levels of Torah study—even if in order to do so they must forfeit the conventional roles of wife and mother. Rabbi Joseph Mesas’s lesson on Mishnah Avot 6:1 is a fine example of such a source, and it is to the analysis and discussion of his teaching that this article is devoted.

‘Transfers’ in Hungarian Literature from Vojvodina

Abstract The study examines the variants of the postmodern phenomena of literary ‘transfer’ (‘trans-correspondence,’ ‘transpass’) and their relationships with Hungarian literature (in Vojvodina) from the beginnings (the creative tradition of Kornél Szenteleky’s oeuvre) up to the events of present-time literary history (e.g., to the publication of Esti by Péter Esterházy). Referential aspects (the literary themes of the railway, the train, the change of trains), specific contexts (e.g., Kornél Esti as a contextual ‘transferring’ literary character) and metaphorical contents (e.g., the meanings of the straight line and the plane in the literature of the region) come into the focus of our research. Another significant aspect of the research is the interpretation of the intricate web of cross-cultural ‘transfers’ (between the works of Dezső Kosztolányi-Danilo Kiš-Péter Esterházy). The dominant motif of Central-Eastern European man’s experience of space is the straight line of the flatlands: lacking the sea-experience of the Southern European or of the more southern regions, as well as the related mythical experience of the world, infinity-experience, or reality perceptions hosting unrealities. The trip in this sense is an intermediate form of life: movement towards other shapes. The direction and extent of this movement has always been defined by the ‘straight line,’ the main road, and later the straight line of the railway

About Some Aspects of “Colonial Racism”

Current article is dedicated to the issues of racism as one of the most important factors of language-cultural discrimination. Basic ideas of postcolonial racism and the phenomenon of post-modernism in racism study have been analyzed. Foreign and Ukrainian scientists’ views upon the modern phenomenon of multiculturalism and its place in the modern philosophy have been evaluated. Natural-biological and theoretical characteristics of the category of “Differences”, including the total bellicose culture of relations between the “majority” and “minority”, have been scrutinized. In this article it has been studied that fixation of “racism” definite autonomy from “nationalism” gives possibility for creating the assumption of the “nationalism’s” probable existence without racism. Besides, the possibility of double identity within nationalism has been examined.

Mediterranean marketing and southern thinking: retrospects and prospects

Today, the Mediterranean is an area where several consumption and marketing practices can be observed and analysed from a different point of view. Moreover, Mediterranean researchers think that the application of a Southern thinking—also known as Meridian thinking—can inject a truly differentiated innovation into the field of marketing and revitalise consumer research. This special edition includes papers covering a wide range of topics related to consumer behaviour in a Mediterranean context and/or through a Mediterranean thinking perspective. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. FROM MARKETING PANACEAS TO CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES The marketing midlife crisis of the 1980s has led to an explosion of the discipline into different panaceas (Brown, 1993). The emergence of numerous (apparently) new currents in marketing (Badot and Cova, 2008) is continuing and has its roots in postmodern thinking centred on fragmentation and pluralism as opposed to dominant and unambiguous positions. If relational marketing was originally proposed as a new dominant theory, which found its essential spirit in Q2 customer relationship management, this idea has been rapidly replaced with the appearance of new paradigms. One of these is experiential marketing, based on the idea of a reenchantment of consumption, in the conviction that consumption is also a question of emotions. Other cure-alls have also been proposed: sensorial marketing, tribal marketing and retro-marketing, to name but three. The list of new marketing gets longer everyday, depending on the prospects for analysis of the adopted market. Against the background of this proliferation of paradigms typical of postmodern thought, attention has been paid to the search for an innovative approach to marketing centred on the local dimension and tied to specific geographic and cultural contexts that go beyond the mainstream models. As an alternative, Stephen Brown suggests adopting a cultural perspective in order to understand better what happens in markets. As editor of two special issues on Celtic Marketing published in the Journal of Strategic Marketing in 2006 and 2007, Brown analyses the concept of the Celticity, seen as a phenomenon with a multiplicity of significances linked to various historical periods: ‘It is, variously, a pre-modern (Iron Age), modern (Machine Age) and post-modern (New Age) phenomenon. It is a phenomenon, furthermore, that is riven with conflict and internecine strife’ (Brown, 2006, p. 6). In his view, Celtic Marketing contrasts with the mainstream approach, including many aspects that the latter overlooks, and offering companies new means to understand and act in the market. In the wake of Brown’s work, other types of regional approaches to consumption and marketing have been investigated such as Islamic marketing (Sandicki and Jafari, 2013; Suerdem, 2013). At the beginning of the 2000 decade and in a different context, a group of researchers from France and Italy began to look for an alternative to the North-Americanmodel and to consider a Mediterranean view of marketing rooted in specific cultural and territorial values (Appendix A). In a similar vein as Celticity, Mediterraneity conveys contrasting meanings but overall provides researchers with a fresh perspective on consumption phenomena. Indeed, Mediterranean researchers think that the application of a Southern thinking—also known as Meridian thinking—can inject a truly differentiated innovation into the field of marketing (Cova, 2005). For that, this article starts by introducing the notion of Southern thinking. Then, it develops its possible impacts on consumer research and marketing, prior to introducing the seven texts composing this special issue.

The Ideologies of the Octagon: The Ultimate Fighting Championship as a Manifestation of the Postmodern Phenomenon

The postmodern moment creates paranoia in the grand narratives of patriarchy, masculinity, and heteronormativity. This paranoia is called pomophobia, the fear of the shift the postmodern moment created and continues to create in the hegemony. In response, the dominant views, particularly patriarchy, have regrouped themselves and created hegemonic masculinity present in athleticism, especially male-driven sports such that of Mixed Martial Arts. This study looks closely at Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) as portrayed in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and how its components exhibit self-reflexivity, to the point that it asserts rebuttals to the very ideologies it advocates. This study looks at MMA in UFC as a counterproposal to the meta-narratives of patriarchy and the universality of truths and how it manifests the postmodern phenomenon.

Značilnosti postmoderne ter vpliv virtualnosti na kulturni turizem in izobraževanje odraslih

Avtorica proučuje povezave med značilnostmi postmoderne, virtualnostjo novih tehnologij in kulturnim turizmom. Najprej opredeli kulturni turizem ter predstavi njegove sestavine in področja. Obravnava tudi izobraževanje odraslih, tako kulturnih turistov kot prebivalcev v kraju, zlasti izobraževanje za razvoj kulturnega turizma, ki je v postmoderni pomembno gibalo gospodarskega in družbenega razvoja.

Taman Mini Indonesia Indah: Education or Entertainment?

With combination of attractive appearance, taste, smell and sound, open air-museums can offer so many things to visitors; from educate to educate and entertain. Here, ‘edutainment’ concept starts to take place. The problem is there can be misconception between the creators and visitor’s perception. In this research, qualitative methodology, through interviews to get information form creator’s perspective and visitor survey to get information form the visitors’ perspectives were conducted with Taman Mini Indonesia Indah as the case study. The findings show that there is still misconception about education and entertainment perceptions in Taman Mini. Taman Mini has strong educational purposes, but because of ack of attractive educational programs, lack of information and interpretation and no encouragement to participate in the educational programmes, visitors considered their visits as recreational, rather than educational. In relation with postmodern phenomenon, Taman Mini can be considered as postmodern and adopting ‘edutainment’ concept, but this concept has became blur and vague, thus Taman Mini now only famous as a recreation venue.

Development Through Dialogue: David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas

If there do exist such things as novelists of ideas, then David Foster Wallace was surely one. On a basic level, Wallace's novels consistently show specific ideas wielding formative dramatic power in minds of principal characters. In Broom of System (1987), Lenore Beadsman fears that she is no more than a linguistic construct; in Infinite Jest (1996), Don Gately commits to praying to a Higher Power of which he cannot conceive; in Pale King (2011), Chris Fogle's life is changed by a series of insights into nature of freedom. On a more profound level, fictional worlds in which Wallace's characters exist have themselves been constructed through author's close engagement with abstract ideas--logical, political, historical--that are made concrete in linguistic registers and plot dynamics of his novels. It is this second mode of engagement with ideas that makes Wallace an unusual figure in modern American literary tradition, at least as that tradition has often been characterized. Philip Rahv, in perhaps most influential statement on this theme, chastised American authors in The Cult of Experience in American Writing (1940) for their unique indifference ... to ideas generally, to theories of value, to wit of speculative and problematical (360). With Henry James as chief culprit, modern American fiction, in Rahv's view, always prefers psychology to philosophy, and ideas are commonly portrayed by American writers in ways that make them wholly subservient to their dramatic role in mind, sensibility, and experience of character thinking them. While first mode of Wallace's engagement with ideas described above could potentially conform to Rahv's characterization, second could not. One of Wallace's innovations was therefore to return a central concern with ideas, and especially with abstract structures that transcend individual, to the art of novel, in James's own much-cited phrase. (1) Equally important is fact that particular sets of ideas that discursively structure Wallace's novels changed and developed over course of his career. This is something thus far under-acknowledged in published criticism on his fiction, which has tended either to treat an individual work--most often Infinite Jest--in isolation, or to reduce Wallace's ideas to a set of tenets drawn mainly from what I have referred to elsewhere as essay-interview nexus, namely Wallace's essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and US and his interview with Larry McCaffery, texts paired together in a 1993 issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction (Kelly). This tendency among critics to prioritize Wallace's early-career statements on his artistic practice is certainly understandable, as Wallace was from beginning a provocative literary critic and sociologist as well as an artist. In particular, his revisionist reading of American metafiction in those early critical statements would prove highly influential, making it henceforth difficult to regard landscape of postwar US fiction and phenomenon of literary postmodernism in ways that ignored Wallace's powerful reconstruction of field. Equally, critical focus on Infinite Jest makes eminent sense, so rich is that novel's engagement with contemporary culture and literary tradition. But with publication of his unfinished novel Pale King in 2011, scholars of Wallace's fiction have been presented with a fairly comprehensive overview of his trajectory as an artist and novelist over course of a two-decade career. And at same time, study of Wallace's work is reaching a point of critical mass at which it should no longer be necessary to argue for Wallace's place in literary canon by attempting to encapsulate his various ideas with reference to a single key text or set of unchanging principles. In this essay, I will examine Wallace's development as a writer with reference to ideas that influence his novels. …

Super-adherencia del maratoniano: variables predictoras y diferencias de género

La vertiente lúdica del creciente tiempo de ocio en España cada vez más se está rellenando con el postmodernista fenómeno de la popularización de la carrera continua. El presente estudio investiga en su mayor practicante: el maratoniano qué variables motivacionales y de entrenamiento predicen su elevado compromiso y adicción negativa con su actividad deportiva, con el objetivo de tratar de obtener unas conclusiones útiles para aumentar la adherencia a programas de actividad físico-deportiva en la población general. Para esto, se parte de la hipótesis de que los maratonianos de nuestra población tienen unos niveles muy altos de compromiso y adicción negativa a correr, que ambos constructos tienen una elevada correlación entre sí y se pueden predecir tanto por sus altos y diferentes tipos de motivación, como por cuatro variables de entrenamiento. Los resultados confirman las hipótesis, obteniéndose valiosos datos descriptivos y unos sólidos modelos predictivos en ambos constructos evaluados por sexo. Sin embargo, lo que fue difícil de explicar fue que las mujeres obtuvieron grados más altos que los hombres en compromiso, adicción negativa a correr y en todas las motivaciones, muchas veces además de forma significativa.

The Posthumanity of “the Son of Man”: Heroes as Postmodern Apocalypse

Abstract: As a serial narrative, the TV series Heroes cannot end and yet its story is impossible without the continual threat of an end of the world. However, this inability to end also connects these narratives with biblical narratives of the end, which are always “apocalypse without apocalypse” (Derrida). Even in its ancient forms, this revelation that does not reveal is a postmodern phenomenon, as that which “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” (Lyotard). Although the show rarely cites the Bible, in juxtaposition to the biblical texts' “son of man” language, Heroes opens up an intertextual context through which the “sons of man” of Daniel 7 and elsewhere in the Bible acquire meaning as posthuman beings, even as the mysterious forces producing the TV show's varied characters are interrogated.

Madness and Mayhem

Although tourism studies is a relatively new academic discipline, practice of dark sites dates back to ancient times. British tourism scholar Philip Stone defines full spectrum of tourism as the act of to sites associated with death, suffering, and seemingly macabre. (1) The field includes everything from haunted houses and museum exhibitions to battlefields and even genocide sites. A.V. Seaton describes this phenomenon as Thanatourism, or travel to a location wholly or partially motivated by desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death, particularly, but not exclusively, violent death. (2) Laurie Beth Clark further narrows field by focusing on trauma tourism, visiting sites where death actually occurred. (3) Maria Tumarkin has coined term traumascapes to describe places scarred by a legacy of traumatic violence. (4) The theoretical issues surrounding tourism intersect with fields of museum studies, sociology, consumer psychology, anthropology, philosophy, history, and visual culture. It is important to examine tourism phenomenon within larger social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. (5) Given vastness of field, this essay will focus primarily on two traumascapes: genocide sites in Cambodia and Rwanda, and will explore intersection of consumer desire with paradoxical roles of education and economics. I will also address role of media in aestheticizing death as well as how kitsch and ethical controversies affect interpretation/consumption of these genocide tourism sites. Patrick West suggests ours is an age of mourning, and our desire to grieve death a postmodern phenomenon. (6) Malcolm Foley and John Lennon concur, arguing that rise of technology in our postmodern world accounts for increase in consumer desire and demand. (7) Yet this view does not take into account historical precedent of pilgrimages and nineteenth-century passion for commemoration. While scholars disagree about reasons for rise in tourism, it is evident that number of sites and visitors has increased dramatically in recent years. In his book Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities (2007), Paul Williams posits a few reasons to account for current need for public commemoration. He suggests that end of Cold War brought a decline in nationalist historic rituals, leading to society's interest in commemorations that create an environment for catharsis, reflection, and redemption. (8) In addition, media increased awareness about global atrocities and subsequent memorial initiatives. Clark aligns visitor motivation with Freudian discourse--the act of repetition compulsion. She does not agree with viewpoint that visitors consume death for salacious pleasure, but rather believes they have an innate compulsion to visit sites of trauma. Clark attributes this compulsion to a philosophical and psychological need for closure and disclosure. (9) In analyzing this desire, one can begin to understand variety of impulses to visit tourism sites. In terms of closure, a visitor may to a site in order to confront past, forgive perpetrator, or mourn victims. If desire is for disclosure, a visitor's impetus might be to facilitate awareness and keep tragedy or criminal act in forefront of people's minds. The foreign visitor may come for educational or historical purposes. Most problematic is voyeur--the visitor motivated by morbid curiosity. Various organizations undertake development of trauma tourism sites. Governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), private corporations, private foundations, social activists, and concerned individuals may all have vested interests in a site's development and purpose. Site managers may be interested in promoting awareness, education, and history. …

Dissembling the Self

What could the dogma of the Assumption of Mary, promulgated by the Catholic Church in 1950, possibly have to do with the postmodern phenomenon of globalism? And what does Jung's phenomenology of the Self have to do with the contemporary scourge of terrorism? Based on these peculiar juxtapositions of ideas, this article focuses attention upon a contemporary manifestation of what Jung would describe as an inflation of the ego in the process of identifying with the Self. Using a combination of Jung's depth psychology and postmodern critic Jean Baudrillard's ideas concerning the current global zeitgeist, we see a pseudo-relationship to the Self being enacted on a universal scale via the whole technological apparatus of global ideology. The ideal of a unified world en-webbed with informational networks discloses an incomplete gestalt, a premature notion of wholeness that has left behind a crucial element which, as a result, casts a threatening shadow—the insidious shadow of terrorism.