After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture
After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture
edited by R. Clifton Spargo and Robert Ehrenreich contributions by James Young, Michael Bernard-Donals, Sidney Bolkosky, Robert Eaglestone, Michael Rothberg, Erin McGlothlin, Geoffrey Hartman, Sara Horowitz, Petra Schweitzer and Berel Lang introduction by R. Clifton Spargo
Rutgers University Press, 2010 Cloth: 978-0-8135-4589-9 | eISBN: 978-0-8135-7658-9 (ePub) | eISBN: 978-0-8135-4815-9 (PDF) Library of Congress Classification PN56.H55A36 2010 Dewey Decimal Classification 809.93358405318
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
After Representation? explores one of the major issues in Holocaust studiesùthe intersection of memory and ethics in artistic expression, particularly within literature.
As experts in the study of literature and culture, the scholars in this collection examine the shifting cultural contexts for Holocaust representation and reveal how writersùwhether they write as witnesses to the Holocaust or at an imaginative distance from the Nazi genocideùarticulate the shadowy borderline between fact and fiction, between event and expression, and between the condition of life endured in atrocity and the hope of a meaningful existence. What imaginative literature brings to the study of the Holocaust is an ability to test the limits of language and its conventions. After Representation? moves beyond the suspicion of representation and explores the changing meaning of the Holocaust for different generations, audiences, and contexts.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
R. Clifton Spargo is an associate professor of English at Marquette University. He is the author of Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death and The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature.
Robert M. Ehrenreich is the director of the university programs division of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
REVIEWS
"A provocative and engaging volume."
— Holocaust and Genocide Studies
"Bringing together some of the best known thinkers in the field of Holocaust literary studies, this volume will quickly become required reading for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and scholars of the Shoah."
— Irene Kacandes, co-editor of Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction Part One. Is the Holocaust Still to Be Written?
The Holocaust, History Writing, and the Role of Fiction
Nostalgia and the Holocaust
Death in Language
Oskar Rosenfeld and Historiographic Realism (including Sex, Shit, and Status) Part Two. A Question for Aesthetics?
Nazi Aesthetics in Historical Context
Writing Ruins
"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem" Part Three. Does Culture Influence Memory?
The Holocaust and the Economy of Memory, from Bellow to Morrison (The Technique of Figurative Allegory)
"And in the Distance You Hear Music, a Band Playing"
Reading Heart of Darkness after the Holocaust
Theorizing the Perpetrator in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Martin Amis's Time's Arrow
