GPI Faculty Works

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Browsing GPI Faculty Works by Author "Frank, David A."

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    “Statistics Don’t Bleed”: Rhetorical Psychology, Presence, and Psychic Numbing in Genocide Pedagogy
    (JSTOR, 2011) Frank, David A.; Slovic, Paul; Vastfjall, Daniel
    Desperate to make present the unfolding Holocaust in central Europe, Arthur Koestler in a 1944 article in the New York Times Magazine grouped himself with the "screamers" who were unheard as millions were murdered in the concentration camps. Seeking to explain why "a dog run over by a car upsets our emotional balance and digestion; three million Jews killed in Poland cause but a moderate uneasiness," Koestler observed: "Statistics don't bleed; it is the detail which counts. We are unable to embrace the total process of our awareness; we can only focus on little lumps of reality" ( Yogi92). Matthew J. Newcomb struggles in his classroom and recent article, "Feeling the Vulgarity of Numbers: The Rwandan Genocide and the Classroom as a Site of Response to Suffering," with the problem he, Koestler, and a host of others face when attempting to move people to moral action in response to trauma that may seem beyond the pale of representation.