Literature of the Holocaust

Catalog description

In this graduate-level seminar, students will read and consider the literature of the Holocaust through the lenses of aesthetics, craft, and the role of literature in/as historical documentation. We will consider, among others, seminal texts such as Elie Wiesel's Night and Art Spiegelman's Maus, as well as great imaginative works of the aftermath such as Wiesel's Day and Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer. Attention will also be paid to Jewish and Catholic theological responses to the Holocaust, to questions of teaching the Holocaust through literature, to questions of generalizable vs. specific "lessons," to popular representations of the Holocaust, and to the role of gallows humor. We will continually consider Theodor Adorno's famous declaration that "There can be no poetry after Auschwitz" in light of his later statement that “suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream: hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.“