The Spectatorship of Suffering PDF Download

Author: Lilie Chouliaraki
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761970408
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Drawing on media and social theory, political philosophy and discourse analysis, this title offers an original theoretical perspective on the role of media in global civil society, and looks at how we might begin to analyse the ways in which distant suffering is portrayed, reproduced and consumed.

Author: Lilie Chouliaraki
Publisher: Pine Forge Press
ISBN: 1446224384
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
`The work is on an important topic that has been oft debated but rarely systematically studied - the political, cultural, and moral effects of distant news coverage of suffering. [The book] is extremely well steeped in the relevant literature, including semiotics, discourse analysis, media and social theory and makes a fresh methodological contribution by looking at the codes and formats of news about suffering. It has a fresh vision and answer to some of the stickiest moral and media problems of our time... and deserves to find its place among important books about the moral aspects of media and society in our times′ - John D Peters, F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor, University of Iowa `Lilie Chouliaraki grounds her sophisticated arguments in meticulous research. The result is a work of important scholarship that might even make us think about the world and its mediation in profoundly new ways′ - Roger Silverstone, Professor of Media and Communications, The London School of Economics and Political Science `Few intellectuals command this scope from classical rhetoric to the cutting edge of contemporary social theory as [Lillie Chouliaraki] is doing in her new book The Spectatorship of Suffering. This book is destined, in my mind, to be foundational for our understanding of not just the media but of the highly complex social process of mediation′ - Ron Scollon, Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University This book is about the relationship between the spectators in countries of the west, and the distant sufferer on the television screen; the sufferer in Somalia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, but also from New York and Washington DC. How do we relate to television images of the distant sufferer? This question touches on the ethical role of the media in public life today. It addresses the issue of whether the media can cultivate a disposition of care for and engagement with the far away other; whether television can create a global public with a sense of social responsibililty towards the distant sufferer.

Author: Lilie Chouliaraki
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745664334
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book Award This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves. By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie as well as in earthquake news on the BBC, this far-reaching book shows how solidarity has today come to be not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning us into the ironic spectators of other people’s suffering.

Author: Luc Boltanski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521659536
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Distant Suffering, first published in 1999, examines the moral and political implications for a spectator of the distant suffering of others as presented through the media. What are the morally acceptable responses to the sight of suffering on television, for example, when the viewer cannot act directly to affect the circumstances in which the suffering takes place? Luc Boltanski argues that spectators can actively involve themselves and others by speaking about what they have seen and how they were affected by it. Developing ideas in Adam Smith's moral theory, he examines three rhetorical 'topics' available for the expression of the spectator's response to suffering: the topics of denunciation and of sentiment and the aesthetic topic. The book concludes with a discussion of a 'crisis of pity' in relation to modern forms of humanitarianism. A possible way out of this crisis is suggested which involves an emphasis and focus on present suffering.

Author: P. Frosh
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023023576X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of distant and horrifying events, experienced by strangers, and brought to us through media technologies. In this book leading scholars explore key questions concerning the truth status and broader implications of 'media witnessing'.

Author: Emily Allen-Hornblower
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110430045
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This book looks at witnesses to suffering and death in ancient Greek epic (Homer’s Iliad) and tragedy. Internal spectators abound in both genres, and have received due scholarly attention. The present monograph covers new ground by dealing with a specific subset of characters: those who are put in the position of spectator to (and, often, commentator on) their own deed(s). By their very nature, protagonists are confined to the role of witness to the suffering (or deaths) they have caused only for brief stretches of time — often a single scene or even just the length of a speech — but every instance is of central importance, not just to our understanding of the characters in question, but also to the articulation of fundamental themes within the poetic works under examination. As they shift from the status of agent to that of witness, these protagonists, qua spectators to the consequences of their actions, give voice to, dramatize, and enact the tragic motifs of human helplessness and mortal fallibility that lie at the core of Homeric epic and Greek tragedy and that define the human condition, in a manner that leads the audience looking on to ponder their own.

Author: Asbjørn Grønstad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415893828
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Few phenomena are as formative of our experience of the visual world as displays of suffering. But what does it mean to have an ethical experience of disturbing or traumatizing images? This collection of essays offers a reappraisal of the increasingly complex relationship between images of pain and the ethics of viewing.

Author: Jonathan Corpus Ong
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783084448
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Based on a 20-month ethnographic study of television and audiences in class-divided Philippines, this is the first book to take a bottom-up approach in considering how people respond to images and narratives of suffering and poverty on television. The book aims to contribute to the broader project of de-Westernizing media studies and explore the tension between ethical prescription and anthropological description in the social sciences and humanities. Winner of the 2016 Philippine Social Science Council Excellence in Research Award.

Author: Nicholas Ridout
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472132008
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Scenes from Bourgeois Life proposes that theatre spectatorship has made a significant contribution to the historical development of a distinctive bourgeois sensibility, characterized by the cultivation of distance. In Nicholas Ridout’s formulation, this distance is produced and maintained at two different scales. First is the distance of the colonial relation, not just in miles between Jamaica and London, but also the social, economic, and psychological distances involved in that relation. The second is the distance of spectatorship, not only of the modern theatregoer as consumer, but the larger and pervasive disposition to observe, comment, and sit in judgment, which becomes characteristic of the bourgeois relation to the rest of the world. This engagingly written study of history, class, and spectatorship offers compelling proof of “why theater matters,” and demonstrates the importance of examining the question historically.

Author: Susan Sontag
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466853573
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away? First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.