The book addresses different kinds of suffering as presented in texts, visual and verbal, and proposes empathy as an ethical exigency of the act of reading and critical tool. The volume examines paintings, comic strips, autobiographies, fictional narratives, and poems on pain from a variety of critical perspectives, bringing together the fields of cognitive psychology, phenomenology, literary criticism, and architecture to account for the complexity of the contagious difference of pain.

In an age of globalization, computerization, and commodification, why read poetry? This most literary, most artificial, and least profitable genre seems ill suited to meet todays challenges. Or is it? This volume, demonstrates the opposite. Scholars and poets from five countries discuss the nature and the function of poetic experiment in our rapidly changing world.

This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the discoursive construction of memory and seeks to explore the cultural work performed by these constructions. Approaching the juncture of memory and identity from an interdisciplinary and global and drawing on S. Halls assertion that culture and identity are irrevocably intertwined through memory, the essays collected here provide informed readings on a variety of topics and contexts.