Representing the Holocaust in British and American
Literature
Course leader: Robert
Eaglestone
Aims:
The
aim of this course is to explore the representation of the Holocaust in British
and American Literature, including significant translated works. Above all, the
course will maintain a concern with form and the possibility and ethics of
representation.
What you should get out of the course (‘objectives’):
The
course looks at what ‘cultural’ (as opposed to ‘historical’ – but, of course,
questioning that division) representations of the Holocaust might mean, and
what the ramifications of these representations are. Using the texts below, supported by one or two other articles or
chapters, each seminar will focus on a different aspect of the following
issues:
·
the role of testimonies and reflections on the
Holocaust, and the problems of translation:
translations;
·
the construction of
Jewish Identity after the Holocaust (principally in America);
·
the relationship
between literature and history;
·
innovations in form
(including the graphic novel) and the impact on writing of the Holocaust.
Learning Outcomes: Students will have wide knowledge representations
of the Holocaust in British and American Literature, and be able to engage in
debates of issues over form and the
possibility and ethics of representation, the role of testimony, the
construction of Jewish identity after the Holocaust (principally in America,
the relationship between literature and history. Their skills in literary and cultural analysis and in writing
will be enhanced.
Seminar
Presentations:
You may be asked to make a presentation at some time in the term. If you are, you will be given guidance on
what to do and on what is expected from a presentation. Although the assessment of this presentation
does not go towards your final mark, comments on it will be entered onto your
report for this course.
Feedback: If you have any issues you
wish to discuss during the course, please contact Robert Eaglestone during his office hour or via e-mail (r.eaglestone@rhul.ac.uk).
At the end of the course, a questionnaire will be distributed to collect your
feedback anonymously. We will also ask
for feedback about the secondary reading (what was useful, what was not, what
was dated etc).
Required
reading: in
addition to the reading below, you will have to buy The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings eds Neil Levi and Michael
Rothberg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003).
|
Week |
Subject |
Texts |
|
1.
|
Major Testimonies |
Primo Levi, If this is a Man and The Truce (London: Abacus, 1979) |
|
2.
|
Major Testimonies |
Elie Wiesel, Night (London: Penguin, 1981) Charlotte Delbo,
‘None of Us Will Return’ from Auschwitz
and After (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) |
|
3.
|
Traumatic Fiction |
Zvi Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God, with
attached essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999) Cynthia Ozick The Shawl and Rosa (New York: Vintage, 1990) |
|
4.
|
Writing Memory |
Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life (London: Viking,
1997 |
|
5.
|
Writing Memory |
Anne Karpf, The War After (London: Minerva, 1997 |
|
6.
|
Formal innovation:
the Graphic Novel |
Art Spiegelman, Maus: a survivor's tale (London:
Deutsch, 1987) and Maus II: and here my
troubles began (London: Deutsch, 1992); Donna Barr, Desert Peach 13 (Chicago: A Fine Line Press, 1996) |
|
7.
|
Formal innovation:
poetry/prose/ Memory |
Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (London: Bloomsbury,
1997) and selected poems |
|
8.
|
Formal innovation:
European memory |
W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London: Penguin, 2000) |
|
9.
|
Popular fiction? |
Robert Harris, Fatherland (London: Arrow, 1993) |
|
10. |
Recent Holocaust
Fiction |
Jonathan Safran Foer,
Everything is Illuminated (Penguin:
London, 2002) |
All other information is in your MA course handbook.
Assessment
One
4000 word essay.
Contact Hours
Two
hour seminar for ten weeks
|
Améry,
Jean, At the Mind’s Limits (London:
Granta 1999) |
|
Banner, Gillian Holocaust Literature: Schulz, Levi,
Spiegleman and the memory of the offence (London: Valentine Mitchell,
2000), |
|
Bartov, Omer, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) |
|
Berger James, After the End: Representations of the post-apocalypse (London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999) |
|
Berger,
Alan Crisis and covenant: the
Holocaust in American Jewish fiction (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1985 |
|
Bernstein, Michael André Forgoen Conclusions: against apocalyptic
history (London: University of Califonia Press, 1994) |
|
Blanchot,
Maurice The Writing of the Disaster,
trans. Ann Smock (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) |
|
Boyarin,
Jonathan Storm from paradise: the politics
of Jewish memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992) |
|
Caruth, Cathy ‘Introduction’, Trauma: Experience and Memory, ed.
Cathy Caruth (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), |
|
Caruth, Cathy Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative
and History (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996) |
|
Cheyette, Bryan ‘The Ethical Uncertainty of
Primo Levi’ in Modernity, Culture and the Jew, eds. Bryan Cheyette and Laura
Marcus (London; Polity Press, 1998). |
|
Cole, Tim Images of the Holocaust: the Myth of the
‘Shoah’ Business (London: Duckworth, 1999) |
|
Epstein, Helen Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of
Survivors (London; Penguin, 1988), p. 335. |
|
Ezrahi, Sidra By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1980) |
|
Ezrahi, Sidra Dekoven By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (London: Chicago
University Press, 1980) |
|
Felman,
Shoshona and Dori Laub, Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London:
Routledge, 1992) |
|
Flanzbaum, Hilene ed. The Americanisation of the Holocaust (London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999), 181-197. |
|
Foley, Barbara ‘ Fact, Fiction, Fascism:
Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust Narrative’, Comparative Literature 34 (1982), 330-360, p. 339. |
|
Friedlander,
Saul (ed), Probing the Limits of
Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) |
|
Friedman, Saul Holocaust Literature: a handbook of critical historical and literary
writing (London: Greenwood Press, 1993) |
|
Furman, Andrew ‘Inheriting the Holocaust: Jewish
American Fiction and the Double Bind of the Second Generation Survivor; in
Hilene Flanzbaum, The Americanisation of the Holocaust (London: John Hopkins
Univerity Press, 1999), 83-101. |
|
Halbwachs, Maurice On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Caser (London: University
of Chicago Press, 1992) |
|
Hartman,
Geoffrey (ed), Holocaust Remembrance;
The Shapes of Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) |
|
Heinemann, M. E. Gender and Destiny: Women Writers and the Holocaust (Westport;
Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 117. |
|
Henri Raczymow, ‘Memory shot through with
holes’, Yale French Studies 85,
(1994), 98-105) |
|
Hirsch, Marianne Family Frames: Photographs, Narrative and Postmemory (LondonL
Harvard Univeristy Press, 1997) |
|
Huyssen, Andreas After the Great Divide (London: Macmillan, 1986) |
|
King, Nicola Memory,
Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh University |
|
Kremer,
S. Lillian Witness through the
imagination: Jewish American holocaust literature. (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1989); |
|
LaCapra,
Dominck History and Memory after
Auschwitz (London: Cornell University Press, 1998) |
|
LaCapra, Dominick Representing the Holocaust (New York: Cornell University Press,
1994) |
|
Lang Berel (ed) Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992) |
|
Lang, Berel Act
and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990) |
|
Lang, Berel The
Future of the Holocaust: Between history and memory (London: Cornell
University Press, 1999). |
|
Langer Lawrence (ed), Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (Oxford: Oxford
Univerity Press, 1995) |
|
Langer,
Lawrence Holocaust Testimony: The ruins
of Memory (London: Yale University Press, 1991) |
|
Langer,
Lawrence Preempting the Holocaust
((Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998) |
|
Langer,
Lawrence The Holocaust and the Literary
Imagination (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1975) |
|
Levinson, Julian ‘Transmitting Yiddishkeit:
Irving Howe and Jewish American Culture’, Jewish
Culture and History 2:2 (1999), 42-65. |
|
Middleton, Peter and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, time and
Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) |
|
Milchman
Alan and Alan Rosenberg, Postmodernism and the Holocaust
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998) |
|
Novick Peter, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2000) |
|
Paizis, George and Andrew Leak (eds), The Holocaust and the Text (London:
Macmillan, 2000) |
|
Prager, Jeffrey Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of
misremembering (London: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 70, 71. |
|
Reiter, Andrea Narrating the Holocaust, trans. Patrick Camiler (London:
Continuum, 2000) |
|
Rose,
Gillian Judaism and Modernity
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) |
|
Rose,
Gillian, Mourning Becomes the Law:
Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) |
|
Rosen, Norma Accidents
of Influence: Writing as a woman and a Jew in America (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1992) |
|
Rosenfeld, Alvin A Double Dying; Reflections on Holocaust
Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) |
|
Rothberg, Michael Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation |
|
Rowland, Antony.
Tony Harrison and the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2001) |
|
Rowland,. Antony Holocaust poetry : awkward
poetics in the work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted
Hughes (Edinburgh : Edinburgh
University Press, 2005). |
|
Schlant, Ernestine The Language of Silence (London: Routledge, 1999). |
|
Schwartz, Daniel, Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999) |
|
Schwarz, Daniel R.Imagining the Holocaust (Basingstoke : Palgrave, 2000). |
|
Sereny, Gitta The German Trauma: Experiences and reflections 1938-2000 (Allen
Lane: Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 93. |
|
Sicher, Efraim (ed) Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1998) |
|
Sicher, Efraim. The Holocaust novel (London : Routledge, 2005) |
|
Steiner,
George Language and Silence (New
York: Athenaum, 1967) |
|
Stone,
Dan ‘Holocaust Testimony and the Challenge to the Philosophy of
History’ in Social Theory after the Holocaust, eds. Robert Fine and Charles
Turner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 219-234 |
|
Vice, Sue (ed) Representing the
Holocaust : in honour of Bryan Burns. (London; Portland, Or.
: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003). |
|
Vice, Sue Holocaust
Fiction (London: Routledge, 2000) |
|
Vice, Sue, Children writing the
Holocaust (Basingstoke
: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) |
|
Wiesel, Elie ‘The Holocaust as Literary
Inspiration’ in Dimensions of the
Holocaust (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990) |
|
Wiesel, Elie All
Rivers Run to the Sea (London: Harper Collins, 1996) |
|
Wood, Nancy Vectors
of Memory (Oxford: Berg, 1999) |
|
Young,
James The Texture of Memory;
Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (London: Yale University Press, 1993) |
|
Young, James (ed), The Art of Memory (New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1994) |
|
Young, James ‘Interpreting Literary Testimony: A
preface to rereading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs’, New Literary History, 18 (1986-87), 403-423 |
|
Young, James Writing
and Rewriting the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) |
|
Zeitlin, Froma I ‘The Vicarious Witness: Belated
memory and authorial presence in Recent Holocaust Literature’, History and Memory (10: 2), 1992,
5-42, p. 5. |