- Re-Presenting the Holocaust through Literature, Theory, & Film: Bearing Witness to the Unwitnessable

Catalog description

In “The Witness and the Archive,” Giorgio Agamben argues that the only true witnesses of the Holocaust are victims of the gas chamber. So how do we bear witness to a traumatic past that defies memory, comprehension, signification, and even representation? Given the rise of hate—anti-Semitism and white nationalism—within the US and abroad, the need to remember and inquire is all the more pressing. This course will look at the ways prose, poetry, film, and theory attempt to bear witness to the Nazi-genocide, complicating and unsettling our understanding of the Holocaust. Although historiography will be frequently engaged, this is neither a history nor purely a literature course but rather a discussion-based inquiry into the way the Holocaust defies our discipline-based modes of study and requires a unique, empathy-rich approach that listens to the past while hearing its ghostly echoes in the present.