Between Hope and Despair

At the end of a century of unfathomable suffering, societies are facing anew the question of how events that shock, resist assimilation, and evoke contradictory and complex responses should be remembered. Between Hope and Despair specifically examines the pedagogical problem of how remembrance is to proceed when what is to be remembered is underscored by a logic difficult to comprehend and subversive of the humane character of existence. This pedagogical attention to practices of remembrance reflects the growing cognizance that hope for a just and compassionate future lies in the sustained, if troubled, working through of these issues.

This is a book that is at once masterful, disturbing, and passionate. The scholarship is meticulous and the analysis penetrating and insightful. The writers challenge us all to confront the enormity of evil as well as to celebrate the profoundly human impulse for redemption., These wide-ranging, courageous essays on the impact of the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and other instances of political terror and mass violence, acknowledge the limits of the social and psychological remedies that can be drawn from remembering the past. At the same time, through a close and intensive study of testimonies, memoirs, fiction (including second-generation witness), and other modes of story telling they scrupulously analyze the possibility of working-through recent trauma. The essayists jointly advocate a new direction, which they call the pedagogical rather than strategic practice of memorialization., Between Hope and Despair is a well-documented, scholarly work. . . . The editors of [the book] should indeed be commended for offering us such a wonderful collection., An exceptionally smart collection of essays., Shoshana Felman observed that the unprecedented teaching possibilities opened up by the 'revolutionary pedagogy of psychoanalysis' have never been fully grasped or utilized in the classroom. The contributors to this collection and other educators now exploring the relations between history, trauma, and teaching, have begun that work. Their efforts lay the groundwork for nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of 'multicultural education' and teaching about and across social and cultural difference.

Roger I. Simon teaches at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. He has written extensively in the area of critical pedagogy and cultural studies and is the author of Teaching Against the Grain: Texts for a Pedagogy of Possibility. Sharon Rosenberg is assistant professor at York University in Toronto, where she teaches in the School of Women's Studies. Her scholarly work attends to questions of feminist remembrance practice in the wake of ongoing traumatic violences against women. Claudia Eppert recently completed her doctoral disseration at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/ University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the ethico-pedagogical possibilities for a responsive/responsible practice of reading contemporary literature of historical witness.

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