The Subject of Holocaust Fiction

Description

Fictional representations of horrific events run the risk of undercutting efforts to verify historical knowledge and may heighten our ability to respond intellectually and ethically to human experiences of devastation. In this captivating study of the epistemological, psychological, and ethical issues underlying Holocaust fiction, Emily Miller Budick examines the subjective experiences of fantasy, projection, and repression manifested in Holocaust fiction and in the reader’s encounter with it. Considering works by Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, Aharon Appelfeld, Michael Chabon, and others, Budick investigates how the reading subject makes sense of these fictionalized presentations of memory and trauma, victims and victimizers. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Prologue: Ghostwriting the Holocaust: The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me SECTION I. Psychoanalytic Listening and Fictions of the Holocaust 1 Voyeurism, Complicated Mourning, and the Fetish: Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl 2 Forced Confessions: Subject Position, Framing, and the “Art” of Spiegelman’s Maus 3 Aryeh Lev Stollman’s The Far Euphrates: Re-Picturing the Pre-Memory Moment SECTION II. Golems, Ghosts, Idols, and Messiahs: Complicated Mourning and the Intertextual Construction of a Jewish Symptom 4 Bruno Schulz, the Messiah, and Ghost/writing the Past 5 A Jewish History of Blocked Mourning and Love 6 See Under: Mourning SECTION III. Mourning Becomes the Nations: Styron, Schlink, Sebald 7 Blacks, Jews, and Southerners in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice 8 (Re)Reading the Holocaust from a German Point of View: Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader 9 Mourning and Melancholia in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz Epilogue: Holocaust, Apartheid, and the Slaughter of Animals: J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Cora Diamond’s “Difficulty of Reality” Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z