Narratives of Annihilation, Confinement, and Survival: Camp Literature in a Transnational Perspective

Description

The concept of “camp narratives” rather than “Holocaust narratives” or “Gulag narratives” is based on the assumption that literary accounts of camp experiences share common traits, aesthetically as well as thematically. The book presents readings of camp literature that underscore the similarities between texts about Soviet gulag camps, Nazi camps and about other camp experiences. While literature about Nazi concentration camps still serves as a point of reference for camp narratives in the same way that the Holocaust serves as a point of reference for other genocidal operations, socialist labor and penal camps have become transnational lieux de mémoire in their own right since 1989. This volume intends to provide a theoretical frame as well as an overview of several important European camp literatures and case studies of iconic camp narratives and to take a comparative and transnational perspective on the genre of the camp narrative. Contents Introduction: Camp Narratives in a Comparative Transnational Perspective I: Comparing Camp Narratives: Theoretical Approaches Towards a Literary History of Concentration Camps: Comparative or “Entangled”? Worlds Apart? Cross-mapping Camp Literature from the Gulag and Nazi Concentration Camps II: Defining Camp Literatures: Overview Transcultural Memorial Forms in Post-Soviet Estonian Narratives of the Gulag Representations of the Gulag and Methods of Resistance: Romanian Detention Memoirs Polish Literature of Soviet Prison Camps: An Outline of Issues Between the Sun and the Stone – The Naked Body: Yugoslav “Re-education” Camps in Literary Representations Presence through Absence: The Aesthetics of Blank Space in French Holocaust Literature and Film Konzentrationslager in Polish Literature: From Metaphorization to Metaphor III: Witnessing and Remembering Camp Experiences: Comparative Case Studies The Grey Zones of Witnessing: Levi, Améry, Shalamov The Ghetto of Leningrad, the Siege of Theresienstadt: A Comparative Reading of Enforced Communities Uncanny Contingencies: Translation, Comparison, and Compassion in Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel A Communist Woman in the Gulag: Gender, Ideology, and Limit-Experience in Ginzburg and Budzyńska Trauma Narration as Adventure Fiction: Ivan Bahrianyj’s Novel The Hunters and the Hunted About the Authors Index of Names Index of Topics