Lit and Culture: Representing History: Encountering the Holocaust Through Literature, Film and…

Catalog description

Obviously enough, we have an ethical obligation to hold onto the Holocaust as historical eventcollectively to remember it and somehow comprehend it. We have an ethical obligation to understand what the Holocaust meant for those who lived through it. We owe it, that is, to those who suffered or died, who suffered and died, to try at least to see what they went through. But as many Holocaust scholars have suggested, the limit nature of the event, its extremity and singularity, may effectively put it out of reach. If, that is, as some have suggested, the Holocaust is unrepresentable, how do those on the outside, those who did not live through the experience, gain access to it? In this course we will approach an engagement with Holocaust history through the problem of representation, looking at a variety of takes at mediation: survivor accounts, like Elie Wiesel's Night, narrative fictions, like Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, fiction films like Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants, documentary films, like Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, hybrid texts like Art Spiegelman's graphic novel MAUS, and Holocaust art, produced by children and adults, both during and after the Holocaust.