The Holocaust
Theoretical Readings
Published on 15. June 2003
Book
Paperback/Softback
528 pages
978-0-7486-1655-8 (ISBN)
Description
The first anthology to address the relationship between the events of the Nazi genocide and the intellectual concerns of contemporary literary and cultural theory in one substantial and indispensable volume. This agenda-setting reader brings together both classic and new theoretical writings. Wide in its thematic scope, it covers such vital questions as:* Authenticity and experience* Memory and trauma* Historiography and the philosophy of history* Fascism and Nazi antisemitism* Representation and identity formation* Race, gender and genocide* The implications of the Holocaust for theories of the unconscious, ethics, politics and aesthetics The readings, which are fully contextualised by a general introduction, section introductions and bibliographical notes, represent the work of many influential writers and theorists, including Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Cathy Caruth, Saul Friedlander, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Theodor Adorno, Zygmunt Bauman, Paul Gilroy, Jacques Derrida, Hayden White and Shoshana Felman.
Reviews / Votes
A highly intelligent collection of writings ... While some of the pieces have already been published elsewhere their juxtaposition [...] gives them renewed power and provocativeness. This anthology is a source of information, argument and debate that will sustain readers and students of the subject for years to come. * Liberal Judaism * A truly excellent selection of responses to the Holocaust ... exceptional in its ability to conjoin efforts at historical analysis with broader critical and theoretical issues. -- Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University An extremely impressive, wide-ranging and timely reader, and an outstanding resource for teaching and studying the Holocaust. -- Dr Robert Eaglestone, Deputy Director, Research Centre for the Holocaust and Twentieth Century History, Royal Holloway, University of LondonMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 244 mm
Width: 172 mm
Weight
867 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-7486-1655-8 (9780748616558)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Neil Levi is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Drew University and Sesqui Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of English, Art History, Film and Media at the University of Sydney. He is the author of articles on twentieth-century literature, culture and theory. Michael Rothberg is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation and numerous articles on twentieth-century literature and theory.
Content
The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings; Table of Contents; Acknowledgments; About this Book; Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, General Introduction: Theory and the Holocaust; I. Theory and Experience; 1. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved; 2. Jean Amery, Resentments; 3. Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory; 4. Ruth Kluger, The Camps; II. Historicizing the Holocaust?; 5. Juergen Habermas, On the Public Use of History; 6. Saul Friedlander, The 'Final Solution': On the Unease in Historical Representation; 7. Dan Diner, Historical Understanding and Counterrationality: The Judenrat as Epistemological Vantage; 8. Zygmunt Bauman, The Uniqueness and Normality of the Holocaust; 9. Omer Bartov, The European Imagination in the Age of Total War; 10. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide; III. Nazi Culture, Fascism, and Antisemitism; 11. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle'; 12. Georges Bataille, The Psychological Structure of Fascism; 13. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Elements of Antisemitism; 14. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Fiction of the Political; 15. Moishe Postone, Anti-Semitism and National Socialism; 16. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men; IV. Race, Gender, and Genocide; 17. Klaus Theweleit, Floods, Bodies, History 18. Gisela Bock, Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany; 19. Joan Ringelheim, The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust; 20. Pascale Rachel Bos, Women and the Holocaust: Analyzing Gender Difference; V. Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Memory; 21. Cathy Caruth, Trauma and Experience; 22. Dominick LaCapra, Trauma, Absence, Loss; 23. Saul Friedlander, Trauma and Transference; 24. Eric Santner, History Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma; 25. Dori Laub, Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening; VI. Questions of Religion, Ethics, and Justice; 26. Arthur A. Cohen, Thinking the Tremendum; 27. Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World; 28. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Spirit; 29. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem; 30. Giorgio Agamben, What is a Camp?; 31. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend; 32. Gillian Rose, New Political Theology: Out of Holocaust and Liberation; VII. Literature and Culture after Auschwitz; 33. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History; 34. Theodor W. Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society; 35. Theodor W. Adorno, Meditations on Metaphysics; 36. Irving Howe, Writing and the Holocaust; 37. Sigrid Weigel, Non-Philosophical Amazement/Writing in Amazement: Benjamin's Position in the Aftermath of the Holocaust; 38. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster; 39. Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth; 40. Geoffrey Hartman, Language and Culture after the Holocaust; 41. Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, Representing Auschwitz; VIII. Modes of Narration; 42. Berel Lang, The Moral Space of Figurative Discourse; 43. James E. Young, Writing the Holocaust; 44. Hayden White, The Modernist Event; 45. Michael A. Bernstein, Against Foreshadowing; 46. Lawrence L. Langer, Deep Memory: The Buried Self; 47. Shoshana Felman, The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah; IX. Rethinking Visual Culture; 48. Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism; 49. Jean Baudrillard, Holocaust; 50. Andreas Huyssen, Anselm Kiefer: the Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth; 51. Gertrud Koch, The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable: Notes on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah; 52. Lilliane Weissberg, In Plain Sight; X. Latecomers: Negative Symbiosis, Postmemory, and Countermemory; 53. Henri Raczymov, Memory Shot Through with Holes; 54. Marianne Hirsch, Mourning and Postmemory; 55. Dan Diner, Negative Symbiosis: Germans and Jews after Auschwitz; 56. James E. Young, The Countermonument: Memory Against Itself in Germany; XI. Uniqueness, Comparison, and the Politics of Memory; 57. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, Two Kinds of Uniqueness: The Universal Aspects of the Holocaust; 58. Yehuda Bauer, What Was the Holocaust?; 59. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; 60. Mahmood Mamdani, Thinking about Genocide; 61. Lilian Friedberg, Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust; 62. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life; Index.