In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag examines the history and development of representing war in photographs. Returning to the earliest images of conflict, she writes: ‘Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what caused this havoc, this carnage – these would be the reactions of a moral monster’ (2003: 7). …
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Towards a Taxonomy of Edgelands Literature
Susan Sontag, in her 1969 work Styles of Radical Will, claimed that ‘there is no such thing as empty space. As long as a human eye is looking there is always something to see’ (10) – foreseeing with the simplicity of her statement a watershed moment in literary and cultural criticism, the spatial turn, the effects of which are still being comprehended and incorporated into the …
View More Towards a Taxonomy of Edgelands LiteratureSnapshots of the Executioners
When the images of torture and abuse by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public in 2004, what was it that shocked so many people? It surely came as little surprise to…
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