Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust

3. A Pedagogy of Trauma (or a Crisis of Cynicism): Teaching, Writing, and the Holocaust

“Looking back at the experience of that class, I therefore think that my job as a teacher, paradoxical as it may sound, was that of creating in the class the highest state of crisis that it could withstand, without ‘driving the students crazy’—without compromising the students’ bounds.”1 In this excerpt from “Education and Crisis; or, the Vicissitudes of Teaching ,” Shoshana Felman refers to a class she taught at Yale called “Literature and Testimony.” In her essay she describes how her students responded emotionally to class reading and discussion of Holocaust and other testimonial texts. Felman’s students were shocked and saddened by what they read and heard, and it was clear that the class affected them in ways Felman had not expected. Students told her how they were having dreams about the course; they called her at all hours to talk about what they were thinking; and they took advantage of class time she provided to “work through” their very visceral response by talking to their peers. In another essay, Felman calls such a response “secondary witnessing ,” or experiencing trauma not as a firsthand survivor but through the words and retellings of a survivor.2 The students’ trauma was filtered 75 3 A Pedagogy of Trauma (or a Crisis of Cynicism) Teaching, Writing, and the Holocaust janet alsup through time and space, as well as through the text they were reading, but Felman insists that it was trauma nonetheless. Felman claims that her students experienced such trauma secondarily, in a way that Dori Laub describes as “participating in the reliving and reexperiencing of the event” by, for example, listening to survivor testimony.3 After reading Felman’s essay, I began to wonder about the ethical implications of traumatizing students. Even if we do so out of a desire to have them understand a pivotal historical event, how can we justify forcing our students into crisis? If we want students to “never forget” the event (as the often-repeated imperative commands), then they must have an unforgettable (or perhaps, in Blanchot’s terms, immemorable) experience, an experience that does not allow them to view the texts as they would any other course assignment—as a “knowledge.” Perhaps there is an inherent connection between effective Holocaust pedagogy and traumatic experience. Felman asks herself similar questions: Is there a relation between crisis and the very enterprise of education? Is there a relation between trauma and pedagogy? Can trauma instruct pedagogy, and can pedagogy shed light on trauma? Can the process of testimony—that of bearing witness to a crisis or a trauma—be made use of in a classroom situation?4 Felman’s answer is, in part, that effective teaching only takes place through a crisis, and if it does not encounter such a crisis (or trauma) the class may not have been fully successful. In other words, she values trauma as a component of pedagogy. But how does a teacher create a classroom crisis that facilitates deep thinking and feeling but that does not “drive the students crazy” as Felman warns? With current rhetoric and writing theory placing such value on a classroom that recognizes the difficulties—both political and ethical— of writing a knowledge that suppresses violence, discomfort, and uncertainty , it seems that Holocaust texts and representations would most effectively trouble many of the assumptions contemporary pedagogy seeks to interrogate. Consequently, in the fall of 1998, I co-taught a class that had the complexity of Holocaust representation as its unifying theme. The class, called “Writing the Holocaust,” was a second writing course for many sophomores and juniors. It was organized around a series of Holocaust texts that took the students though various genres: history , memoir, fiction (short story and novel), poetry, film, graphic novel, and the museum as text. It asked students to answer questions about memory, history, genre, and language in representing the Holocaust, as well as to grapple with questions of accuracy, effectiveness, and purpose. 76 alsup While we did not see the goal of the course as the production of trauma, we did focus the class on questions that were inherently troubling, thereby making easy answers impossible and, consequently, the course potentially frustrating. The class was founded on the idea that a comprehensive account of the Holocaust in any medium is, if not impossible , then pretty close to it. There can be different representations, but each will inherently fail. We addressed these...