Words and witness: Narrative and aesthetic strategies in the representation of the Holocaust.
Item
-
Title
-
Words and witness: Narrative and aesthetic strategies in the representation of the Holocaust.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9119636
-
identifier
-
9119636
-
Creator
-
Hamaoui, Lea Fridman.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Rosette C. Lamont
-
Date
-
1991
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, Comparative | Literature, Modern | History, Modern
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation examines Holocaust literature in an attempt to grasp a diverse group of works in more precise, formal and literary terms. It is concerned with an analysis of formal issues and difficulties that face the writer in his attempt to represent the experience of historical catastrophe. Thus the analysis establishes a larger category of "historical horror" within which a literature (fiction, poetry, film, short stories) of the Holocaust finds a significant--but not formally distinct--place.;Chapter I sets up crucial distinctions having to do with "kinds of horror" in literature. The chapter compares the writing style, strategies and devices of a master of horror "from within the human mind" (Edgar Allen Poe) to the very different techniques of a Joseph Conrad in "Heart of Darkness." Conrad's work is a masterful representation of horror whose origin is not from within the mind but from without, in history. Specifically, it is concerned with the state sanctioned exterminations of between 12 and 32 million natives of the native Congo at the turn of the century by the Western European nations. The pivotal literary issues that mark Conrad's novella and that separate it from Poe's formulation of horror concern strategies of omission and silence on the one hand and strategies that implicate and address the problematic status of "reality" on the other. The chapter provides a detailed examination of different kinds of silence in "Heart of Darkness" and of the ways that the narrative is structured around issues of voice and witnessing.;The chapters that follow extrapolate from the above analysis. Chapters two and three examine structures and textures of silence (and their connections to voice) in works by Appelfeld, Pagis, Lanzmann, Schwarz-Bart, Kosinski, Borowski and Celan. Chapters four and five explore the "literary act of witness" in Wiesel, Rawicz and Delbo. These chapters explore the operating disbelief that accompanies the experience of historical trauma, that governs presumptions and insufficiencies within narrative and the strategies by which these writers wrestle with this problematic of the "real.".
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
