“The legacy of the Shoah” writes Eva Hoffman, a child of Holocaust survivors, “is being passed on to … the post-generation … The inheritance … is being placed in our hands, perhaps in our trust.” We ...are entering an era that will witness the end of direct survivor testimony. As we move farther and farther from the events of the Shoah, subsequent generations, who see their own lives shaped by the defining rupture of the past, continue to respond to the call of memory. The current era has seen a burgeoning of Holocaust literary representation in the evolving genre of graphic novels, narratives that reanimate and materialize the past through the juxtapositions and intersections of text and image. Calling upon the Deuteronomic imperative to “teach your children,” second and third-generation Holocaust writers, through the hybrid form of the graphic novel, attempt to give shape to the traumatic imprint of the Shoah and its haunting aftermath for generations extending beyond that history.
Philip Roth, throughout his career—from “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959) to his final novel Nemesis (2010)—has been preoccupied with selfhood and identity in ways that lend themselves to analysis with ...fundamental psychoanalytic concepts and issues, particularly as they relate to uncontrolled impulses, unconscious drives and desires, and sublimation and repression. This essay engages with the ways in which Roth's fiction stages the impulsive dialectics of flight and return and fantasy and sublimation in his first and final works.
Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger show that Holocaust literary representation has continued to flourish—gaining increased momentum even as its perspective shifts, as a third generation adds its ...voice to the chorus of post-Holocaust writers. In negotiating the complex thematic imperatives and narrative conceits of the literature of these writers, this bold new work examines those structures, ironies, disjunctions, and tensions that produce a literature lamenting loss for a generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended trauma of the Holocaust. Aarons and Berger address evolving notions of “postmemory”; the intergenerational transmission of trauma; inherited memory; the psychological tensions of post-Holocaust Jewish identity; tropes of memory and the personalized narrative voice; generational dislocation and anxiety; the recurrent antagonisms of assimilation and alienation; the imaginative reconstruction of the past; and the future of Holocaust memory and representation.
Cet essai a trait à « l’héritage » rothien. Au travers, principalement, de l’étude d’une nouvelle de Sam Apple publiée en 2015 et d’un roman graphique publié par Anya Ulinich en 2014, on ...s’intéressera à la façon dont les successeurs et disciples de l’auteur s’emploient à le mettre en scène et à le réinventer dans leur fiction, suivant un processus qui tient tout à la fois de l’hommage respectueux et de l’irrévérence parodique. La démarche, par-delà toute anxiété de l’influence, procède d’une réflexion ironique sur les rapports entre fiction et métafiction ainsi que sur les ambiguïtés et les paradoxes inhérents à toute représentation de soi-même et d’autrui.
Master storyteller and literary stylist, Bernard Malamud is considered one of the top three most influential postwar American Jewish writers, having established a voice and a presence for other ...authors in the literary canon. Along with Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, Malamud brought to life a decidedly American Jewish protagonist and a newly emergent voice that came to define American letters and that has continued to influence writers for over half a century. This collection is a tribute to Malamud in honor of the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Literary critic Harold Bloom suggests that Malamud is perhaps the purest storyteller since Leskov, the nineteenth-century Russian novelist and satirist. Novelist Cynthia Ozick, in a tribute to Malamud, described him as the very writer who had brought into being a new American idiom of his own idiosyncratic invention. Unlike other collections devoted to Malamud, this collection is international in scope, compiling diverse essays from the United States, France, Germany, Greece, and Spain, and demonstrating the wide range of scholarship and approaches to Bernard Malamud's fiction. The essays show the breadth and depth of this masterful craftsman and explore through his short fiction and his novels such topics as the Malamudian protagonist's relation to the urban/natural space; Malamud's approach to death; race and ethnicity; the Malamudian hero as modern schlemiel; and the role of fantasy in Malamud's fiction. Bernard Malamud is a comprehensive collection that celebrates a voice that helped to shape the last fifty years of literary works. Readers of American literary criticism and Jewish studies alike will appreciate this collection.