This paper examines Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (2007) in the context of Holocaust literature and historiography. It begins with an introduction to the genre of Holocaust literature and the ...problematic nature of ‘survivor’ testimony. Michaels’ work is then contextualized within this body of literature. The essay goes on to examine the means through which Michaels approaches the act of writing history, specifically the recording of history through alternative means to the hegemonic historiography utilized by the Nazis.
This essay draws on critical theories of post-Holocaust testimony and postmemory in conjunction with the emerging sociological concept of “empathetic identification” to investigate the implications ...of trauma healing in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces . The novel features two protagonist narrators—Jacob Beer, a child survivor of the Holocaust, and Ben, a child of Holocaust survivor parents—each acknowledging the moral imperatives to remember the painful past of the Holocaust as well as the need to envision the possibility of coming to terms with the horrors of the past. Contrary to Holocaust literature that focuses on the irredeemable breakdown in the psyche, Fugitive Pieces makes it the central motivating aim to ponder the complex and bewildering experience of healing. With two memoirs—Jacob’s and Ben’s—each addressing the traumatic memory for the dead and to the living, Fugitive Pieces is characteristically structured as a model of the witnessing process, a process that aims to move beyond the isolation imposed by trauma. As a theoretical starting point in my reading of Fugitive Pieces , I turn to the psychoanalytical theory of testimony and postmemory—especially the works of Dori Laub and Marianne Hirsch— to examine how testimony in association with empathetic identification can help sustain life after massive trauma.
Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces diverges from earlier literature of the Holocaust in its engagement with the pastoral tradition. While the pastoral had been appropriated by the Nazis as part of their ...Blood and Soil ideology, Michaels reclaims and revises the pastoral and its sister genre, the elegy. She creates a traumatic pastoral focused on geological cataclysm and redefines Blood and Soil through images of soil soaked with blood. Michaels allows an anthropomorphized nature to grieve, but by presenting images of infertility rather than fertility she refuses the traditional compensatory apparatus of the elegy.
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.
The best known and most influential postmodern discourses are strongly marked by a 'metaphorics of loss and impoverishment', and this characteristic has been at its strongest in meditations upon the ...Holocaust. In England, the anti rationalist emphasis of some postmodernist discourse was countered most vociferously in the work of Gillian Rose, in 'Mourning Becomes the Law, and Anne Michaels in 'Fugitive Pieces'. Anne Michaels' fictional voice is as distinctive amongst contemporary novelists as Rose's was amongst philosophers. (Quotes from original text)
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.
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Provider: - Institution: - Data provided by Europeana Collections- All metadata published by Europeana are available free of restriction under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain ...Dedication. However, Europeana requests that you actively acknowledge and give attribution to all metadata sources including Europeana
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