Special Themes in Literature: Narrating the Unspeakable

Cross listed with GERMAN 3005

How do we represent an event that many survivors claimed was beyond human comprehension? This course examines the diverse literary responses to the Holocaust, moving from the immediate testimony of survivors to the imaginative reconstructions of contemporary writers. Although we will cover the basic historical facts surrounding the Holocaust, this course requires no specialized historical background; instead, we focus on the ethical and aesthetic choices authors make when transforming historical trauma into art.

The course begins with the foundational voices of Elie Wiesel, Ida Fink, and Primo Levi, using Levi’s concept of the “Gray Zone” to navigate the moral complexities of survival. We will contrast the visceral poetry of Paul Celan and Charlotte Delbowith the “anti-sentimental” memoir of Ruth Klüger, exploring how gender and style shape the act of bearing witness. As the semester progresses, we move into the post-memory era, analyzing how the Holocaust is reimagined through the graphic storytelling of Art Spiegelman, the cynical satire of Yishai Sarid, and the provocative fiction of Nathan Englander.