After Representation? The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture

Edited by R. Clifton Spargo and Robert M. Ehrenreich

After Representation? explores one of the major issues in Holocaust studies—the intersection of memory and ethics in artistic expression, particularly within literature.

As experts in the study of literature and culture, the scholars in this collection examine the shifting cultural contexts for Holocaust representation and reveal how writers—whether they write as witnesses to the Holocaust or at an imaginative distance from the Nazi genocide—articulate the shadowy borderline between fact and fiction, between event and expression, and between the condition of life endured in atrocity and the hope of a meaningful existence. What imaginative literature brings to the study of the Holocaust is an ability to test the limits of language and its conventions. After Representation? moves beyond the suspicion of representation and explores the changing meaning of the Holocaust for different generations, audiences, and contexts.

In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume include Michael Bernard-Donals, Sidney Bolkosky, Robert Eagleston, Geoffrey Hartman, Sara B. Horowitz, Berel Lang, Erin McGlothlin, Michael Rothberg, Petra Schweitzer, and James E. Young.

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R. Clifton Spargo is an associate professor of English at Marquette University. He is the author of Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death and The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature.

Robert M. Ehrenreich is the director of the university programs division of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.