The aim of this article is to explore a tension in understanding post-Holocaust writing, specifically Second Generation poetry, between the idea of ‘working through’ and the complexities of ...post-Holocaust writing that Antony Rowland describes as ‘awkward poetics’, the ‘noncathartic artistry of disaster’.
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Anne Michaels’s novel, Fugitive Pieces, has been criticized for
its highly poeticized representation of the Holocaust. In this
essay, however, Marita Grimwood argues that the novel uses
structures of ...narrative transmission to explore precisely the
difficulties of representing history and trauma in language.
Grimwood proposes that the representation of three key
characters is central to this undertaking. First, Jakob Beer, the
child survivor and poet who narrates two thirds of the novel, is
positioned as an intergenerational mediator, belonging fully
neither to a pre-war nor a postwar generation. Two further characters
(Ben, the child of survivors who narrates the end of the
novel, and Michaela, Jakob’s second wife) symbolize the figure
of the reader after the Holocaust, negotiating a link to the past
through their interpretation and witnessing of Jakob’s life.
The novel recognizes the problems inherent in communicating
meaningful knowledge of past events to those living in
the present. Yet, partly through Jakob’s vocation as a poet, it
proposes also that poetry is a tool, however imperfect, for the
communication of such knowledge.
Estrin discusses the politics of adoption in he context of two recent books--Binjamin Wilkomirski's "Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939-1948" and Anne Michaels' "Fugitive Pieces"--which, like ..."Austerlitz," were spurred into being by those myths and which exist in the same indeterminate zone between reality and fantasy as the myths themselves.
Memory's situated, relative, and partial dialogue with the past is used to counter the myth that history can be pure, complete, and transcendent. When applied to Michael Ondaatje's and Anne ...Michaels's literary representations of immigrant communities in Toronto, the concepts of the chronotype and counter-memory give rise to the idea of the city as a counter-monument: that is, a space-time complex that can be read ethically as the site of alternative or supplementary histories. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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One service a work of art can perform is to illuminate intellectual disputes at a particular moment in an evolving academic field when different scholarly approaches establish incongruent claims or ...stakes. Anne Michaels's lyrical novel, "Fugitive Pieces," accomplishes just this by illustrating the complexity of bringing feminism, with its attention to gender and sexual politics, into the field of Holocaust studies, with its attention to trauma and racialized politics, and it does so by keeping men at the center of imaginative inquiry.
Parry discusses the representation of mourning in regards to the Holocaust in the works of Gillian Rose and Anne Michaels. Both philosopher and novelist in their presentation of mourning appropriate ...to the Holocaust offer a challenge to the more familiar postmodern directions of philosophy and fiction about the Shoah.
"Anne Michaels has inspired readers around the world with her works and now she can inspire them again as Toronto's new Poet Laureate," said Mayor John Tory. "I would like to congratulate and thank ...George Elliott Clarke for his tremendous commitment and passion as our Poet Laureate for the past three years." "The Poet Laureate position is one of the many ways that the City of Toronto supports the city's literary community," said Councillor Michael Thompson (Ward 37 Scarborough Centre), Chair of the City's Economic Development Committee. "Through the Poet Laureate, the Toronto Book Awards, the Toronto Public Library and the Toronto Arts Council, we recognize and celebrate the importance of our writers." The position of Toronto's Poet Laureate was initiated in 2001, with Dennis Lee serving as Canada's first municipal Poet Laureate. Lee embarked on an ambitious program that saw the unveiling of a monument of poet Al Purdy at Queen's Park.
This article examines the special status of the English language in representing the Holocaust. To this end, I look first at three authors who wrote in the late 1940s-David Boder, John Hersey and ...Ruth Chatterton-and argue that they, in different ways, evoke anxiety in writing about the Holocaust in English. I contrast this early post-war writing with the more recent approach of Anne Michaels in Fugitive Pieces, where one finds a celebration of English as a language of the Holocaust. The move from anxiety to celebration takes place, however, only at the expense of other languages, particularly Yiddish. More generally, I submit that attention to the specific role of a language in representing the Holocaust points to a multilingual approach to language and the Holocaust.
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