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The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz

Online ISBN:
9780226527239
Print ISBN:
9780226527215
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

The Conflagration of Community: Fiction before and after Auschwitz

Published:
11 August 2011
Online ISBN:
9780226527239
Print ISBN:
9780226527215
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric.” This book challenges Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. It considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake. The chapter juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust—Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus, and Kertész’s Fatelessness-with Kafka’s novels and Morrison’s Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, the chapter questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz—a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust—and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The book is a study of literature’s value to fathoming the unfathomable.

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