The Holocaust: Cultural Representations

Catalog description

We will study cultural attempts to come to terms with an event that eludes full comprehension, asking how understanding is transformed when straightforward meaning and legibility can no longer be assumed. Taking as our point of departure a new reading of Theodor W. Adorno's famous and often misunderstood dictum that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," we will study the ways in which exemplary works of literature, art, film, and philosophy engage the challenge of speaking after the very idea of speaking has become suspect. Witnessing, mourning and melancholia, personal and historical loss, the relation between language and disaster, and the uneasy conjunction of ethics and art will be thematized in this course. Writers, artists, and filmmakers to be studied will include Adorno, Agamben, Blanchot, Freud, Celan, Lanzmann, Levi, and Spiegelman. Taught in English; students from diverse fields welcome.