Words and Witness: Narrative and Aesthetic Strategies in the Representation of the Holocaust

by Lea Wernick Fridman

Overview

Narratives of large-scale historical horror and trauma cross a terrible boundary in representation. What forms are adequate to such experience? What are the forms that such narratives actually take? Fridman is fascinated by the boundary that separates the representable from the unrepresentable and by the sense that literary works on either side of this boundary are governed by a different dynamic and set of rules from one another. Close readings of works by Aharon Appelfeld, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Charlotte Delbo, Jerzy Kosinski, Claude Lanzmann, Dan Pagis, Piotr Rawicz, André Schwarz-Bart, and Elie Wiesel explore the inventive means by which these Holocaust writers wrestle with experiences that, in a very real sense, cannot be put into words. A new reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness sets the stage for comparative and far-reaching literary insights into the notion and conception of traumatic narrative.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791492444
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	02/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	177
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Lea Wernick Fridman is Assistant Professor of English at Kingsborough Community College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. History, Fantasy, and Horror

2. The Silence of Historical Traumatic Experience: Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939

3. Silence in Language and in History

4. Historical Horror and the Literary Act of Witness: An Examination of Elie Wiesel's Night

5. The Literary Act of Witness: Narrative, Voice, and the Problematic of the Real

6. Concluding Thoughts and Prompting

Notes
Works Consulted
Index

What People are Saying About This

Alan L. Berger

This is an engaging, reflective, and thoughtful work. The author has insightfully set the stage for further discussion of the issue of horror and art, a topic that unfortunately is very much with us.
—(Alan L. Berger, author of Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust)

Herman Rapaport

This is a gripping and compelling piece of work. There's considerable wisdom in this book distilled from years of thinking about the subject in a sustained and personal way. I think this is arguably the best book on Holocaust literature that has ever been written. It is accessible, direct, honest, profound.
—(Herman Rapaport, author of Is There Truth in Art?)

Editorial Reviews

"This is a gripping and compelling piece of work. There's considerable wisdom in this book distilled from years of thinking about the subject in a sustained and personal way. I think this is arguably the best book on Holocaust literature that has ever been written. It is accessible, direct, honest, profound." — Herman Rapaport, author of Is There Truth in Art?

"This is an engaging, reflective, and thoughtful work. The author has insightfully set the stage for further discussion of the issue of horror and art, a topic that unfortunately is very much with us." — Alan L. Berger, author of Children of Job: American Second-Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust

From the Publisher