JFK and dark tourism: A fascination with assassination

Abstract

This paper sets out to explore the phenomenon that the authors have entitled Dark Tourism and to analyse evidence of its existence in the context of sites associated with the life and death of the former US President, John F. Kennedy (JFK). These sites present front‐line staff, curators, and development bodies with dilemmas concerning legitimacy of presentation/representation and lead to questions about the, often cited, educational mission, of such attractions. The media has had a central role in the development of this phenomenon and documentation and illustration via news and film has been central to much of the interpretation of JFK and the Kennedys. This paper considers media fascination with this subject and examines exploitation of this interest at three, contrasting sites.     

Culture and Truth: Nietzsche and Classical Philology

Several recent studies have returned to the famous controversy over the reception of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872). By reinterpreting it within the immediate context of Germany in the early 1870s, James Whitman understands this controversy as a Methodenstreit within Classical Philology and James I. Porter claims that, through this controversy, Nietzsche developed an extensive critique of modern culture. I contend that Nietzsche’s reaction to the scholarly rejection of his first publication resulted in no immediate response on his behalf; rather, it led to three years of intense rethinking and strengthening of the position he took in The Birth of Tragedy. This is evidenced in his early published essays and notebooks of 1872–1875. From the first readers of these early notebooks, Karl Schlechta and Anni Anders, to its most recent interpreters, Richard T. Grey and Alexander Nehamas, these scholars are unanimous in understanding them as Nietzsche’s attempt to work through a number of conventional philosophical problems. I argue that Nietzsche developed in these essays and notebooks a type of criticism that broke away from all traditional philosophical problems and creatively introduced such notions as cultural horizon, background phenomena, and life as a philosophical measure — all of which would be further refined in his mature texts of the 1880s and underpin his innovative concepts of the will to power and eternal recurrence.     

Odd bedfellows: Nietzsche and Mill on marriage

This paper examines Nietzsche's views on love and marriage in the works of his middle period. Contrary to the general consensus in the secondary literature regarding Nietzsche's ideas on these matters, it shows that he offers several positive reflections on love and marriage. Indeed, at times he accepts that friendship is possible between the genders and even models marriage on friendship. Modelling marriage on friendship creates an overlap between Nietzsche's thought and that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. However, it is argued here that, albeit for different reasons, none of these visions of marriage as friendship succeeds in fully accommodating sexuality.     

Nietzsche on Memory and Active Forgetting

This article explores Nietzsche’s approach to the fundamental question of “how to live one’s life”, and more specifically his view of the role of the past in seeking an answer to this question. By discussing Nietzsche’s views of how different nations and cultures relate to their history, I suggest some comparisons with how individuals might do so. Common to both is the relationship between the past as a resource and as a burden: the burden of single events or periods and the burden of the abundance of facts. Key to Nietzsche’s thinking on these questions is his account of the relationship between remembering, promising, and forgetting. He considers “active forgetting” paradoxically as both a form of forgetting and a way of taking full responsibility for the past.