Traumatism Realism: The Demands of Holocaust RepresentationHow to approach the Holocaust and its relationship to late twentieth-century society? While some stress the impossibility of comprehending this event, others attempt representations in forms as different as the nonfiction novel (and Hollywood blockbuster) Schindler's List, the documentary Shoah, and the comic book Maus. This problem is at the center of Michael Rothberg's book, a focused account of the psychic, intellectual, and cultural aftermath of the Holocaust. Drawing on a wide range of texts, Michael Rothberg puts forth an overarching framework for understanding representations of the Holocaust. Through close readings of such writers and thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Ruth Klüger, Charlotte Delbo, Art Spiegelman, and Philip Roth and an examination of films by Steven Spielberg and Claude Lanzmann, Rothberg demonstrates how the Holocaust as a traumatic event makes three fundamental demands on representation: a demand for documentation, a demand for reflection on the limits of representation, and a demand for engagement with the public sphere and commodity culture. As it establishes new grounding for Holocaust studies, his book provides a new understanding of realism, modernism, and postmodernism as responses to the demands of history. |
Contents
| 1 | |
MODERNISM AFTER AUSCHWITZ | 17 |
REALISM IN THE CONCENTRATIONARY UNIVERSE | 97 |
POSTMODERNISM OR THE YEAR OF THE HOLOCAUST | 179 |
From the Jewish Question to Jewish Questioning | 265 |
Other editions - View all
Traumatism Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation Michael Rothberg No preview available - 2000 |
Common terms and phrases
Adorno and Blanchot aesthetic American anti-Semitism Art Spiegelman attempt barbed wire calls caust chronotope concentration camp concentrationary universe concept constellation contemporary context coup critical critique culture death Delbo discourse Elie Wiesel Eric Santner essay ethical everyday experience extreme fact fascism Felman fiction film German Holo Holocaust Memorial Holocaust representation Holocaust Testimonies identity implies Jewish Jewish-American Jews Klüger L'Insurgé Langer language Lanzmann literary literature Maurice Blanchot Maus memoir modern modernist museum narrative narrator Nazi genocide Nazism Negative Dialectics Nightline notion Operation Shylock past Philip Roth poetry after Auschwitz political possibility postmodern postwar present prisoners produces question radically reading reality relationship rhetoric Roth Roth's Saul Friedlander Schindler's List Shoah significance social space Spiegelman Spielberg story suggests survival survivors temporal texts theory Thomas the Obscure tion Todorov Trans traumatic realism understanding University Press victims Vladek witness words writing York