After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture

PREFACE

ix PREFACE The generation of scholars who first focused on an emerging canon of Holocaust literature—figures such as George Steiner, Lawrence L. Langer, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, and Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi—were faced with the task of defining what Holocaust literature might be. Although this task was initially accomplished by a process of exclusion, asking a series of questions framed in the negative—When was representation inappropriate, and which sorts of representation might be inappropriate? What was it about the Holocaust that empiricist history-writing or literature or even testimony could not account for? What kinds of text shouldn’t count as Holocaust literature? What should imaginative literature not do?—the legacy of these studies was an emergent critical discourse about the literature of witness and the limits of any representation of atrocity, the impact of which was felt across the discipline of literary studies as well as in other fields in the humanities. These questions are no less urgent today for scholars who have found new ways of talking, for example, about silence, trauma, testimony, and memory— all of which are topics addressed in this collection. If the prevailing suspicion of Holocaust literature had once been focused on whether the literary imagination in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries was adequate to the task of representing atrocity while remaining faithful to the historicity of such devastating, immensely significant events, contemporary authors of Holocaust literature and scholars of their work have concentrated with ever greater concern on the cultural context in which such literature is produced. Moreover, the diversification of media for representing historical and contemporary events has increased the urgency of addressing the intersection between the hypothetically nonrepresentable event and the pervasive, representation-saturated environment. In the postmodern era—which is defined as much by the technologies of representation as by any other single cultural or political factor—it may be that other representational media have taken the lead in conveying the Holocaust to the general public. Amid the American public, both Jewish and non-Jewish alike, young people are increasingly likely to glean their first Holocaust memories from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, much as a former generation once proved susceptible to The Diary of Anne Frank. The space allotted to Holocaust literature—which used to involve holding the line between, say, the facts of history and the long-term emotional and imaginative resonances of the event—has thus shrunk in recent years under the pressure of cultural accessibility rather than under the burdens of history or difficult memory and has forced us to reframe many of our questions about Holocaust memory. The genesis of this volume was the  Symposium on Literature and the Holocaust, organized by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (CAHS) of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. This symposium and the working sessions held prior to the public presentations were the first major CAHS programs dedicated exclusively to the study of literature on the Holocaust and were intended to provide a foundational sense of the current state of the field (i.e., the major topics, literatures, and issues being examined in our time) as well as to illustrate the increased recognition and importance of interdisciplinary research and literary studies in the previously historian-driven field of Holocaust studies. The scope of symposia is naturally limited by time and resources, however, and a great deal more work was thus invested in this volume to produce a fuller portrait of the main questions with which the field is currently grappling. Some of the original presentations were thus omitted; others were substantially reworked. In some cases participants in the symposium submitted largely new work for the volume; and some essays here come from contributors not at the symposium. This collection addresses the contemporary state of the field by examining the debate in three, often interrelated areas of inquiry. Part One, entitled “Is the Holocaust Still to Be Written?” revisits one of the longstanding questions about “Holocaust writing,” as originally raised by Berel Lang’s seminal edited collection , Writing and the Holocaust (). Whereas that collection addressed historiographical questions about the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a historical event (e.g., specifically whether fiction and literary humor were appropriate responses to the Holocaust), the essays in Part One focus on how specific kinds of language currently shape the field of Holocaust studies: Geoffrey Hartman on literary versus historical writing and their different effects on collective memory; Sarah Horowitz and...