CAVE – författare

From the headlines of local newspapers to the coverage of major media outlets, scenes of war, natural disaster, political revolution and ethnic repression greet readers and viewers at every turn. What we often fail to grasp, however, despite numerous treatments of events is the deep meaning and broader significance of crisis and disaster. The complexity and texture of these situations are most evident in the broader personal stories of those whom the events impact most intimately. Oral history, with its focus on listening and collaborative creation with participants, has emerged as a forceful approach to exploring the human experience of crisis.Despite the recent growth of crisis oral history fieldwork, there has been little formal discussion of the process and meaning of utilizing oral history in these environments. Oral history research takes on special dimensions when working in highly charged situations often in close proximity to traumatic events. The emergent inclination for oral historians to respond to document crisis calls for a shared conversation among scholars as to what we have learned from crisis work so far. This dialogue, at the heart of this collection of oral history excerpts and essays, reveals new layers of the work of the oral historian. From the perspective of crisis and disaster oral history, the book addresses both the ways in which we think about the craft of oral hsitory, and the manner in which we use it.The book presents excerpts from oral histories done after twelve world crises, followed by critical analyses by the interviewers. Additional analytical chapters set the interviews in the contexts of pyschoanalysis and oral history methodology.

Dr Cave studies the relationship between the traditions of personal devotion in sixteenth-century France and the poetry which flourished at the end of the century and the beginning of the seventeenth. It was a poetry of intense personal commitment, preoccupied with penitence and confession, the vanity of life, the imminence of death, the meaning of the Incarnation and the Passion; often verging on mysticism and mingling of the sensual, the intellectual and the spiritual in a manner often thought typical of the baroque. It was part of a European movement, and there is much here to interest the student of the early seventeenth-century sensibility. A comparable book on English literature is Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation, but the lines of Dr Cave's enquiry are new. The book has a fourfold interest: to readers concerned with French literature; to those with particular interest in the traditions of devotion; to those concerned with comparative studies in the baroque period, and to students of rhetorical analysis.