This course will examine a vast array of cultural responses to twentieth-century atrocities. We will look in particular at Japanese and Jewish responses, but at European and South African ones as well, among others. We will pay close attention to how catastrophic events are represented through various aesthetic forms—literary, visual, and musical, and through various systems of thought—psychoanalytic, religious, philosophical, etc. Through close reading, looking, and listening, and through our own analytical and personal writing, we will engage topics such as: the aesthetics and ethics of representing catastrophe and suffering, the relationship between personal and communal suffering, models of mourning, in art and in life, across cultures, and the place of beauty in the depiction of suffering.