Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew

by Susan Gubar

Overview

In this pathbreaking study, Susan Gubar demonstrates that Theodor Adorno's famous injunction against writing poetry after Auschwitz paradoxically inspired an ongoing literary tradition. From the 1960s to the present, as the Shoah receded into a more remote European past, many contemporary writers grappled with personal and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the disaster. By speaking about or even as the dead, these poets tell what it means to cite, reconfigure, consume, or envy the traumatic memories of an earlier generation. This moving meditation by a major feminist critic finds in poetry a stimulant to empathy that can help us take to heart what we forget at our own peril.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253218872
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	10/18/2006
Series:	Jewish Literature and Culture
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Susan Gubar is Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University. Her two most recent publications are Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture and Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
List of Abbreviations for citations
1. The Holocaust Is Dying
2. Masters of Disaster
3. Suckled by Panic
4. About Pictures Out of Focus
5. Documentary Verse Bears Witness
6. The Dead Speak
7. "Could You Have Made an Elegy for Every One?"
8. Poetry and Survival
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"A sensitive and superb treatment of Holocaust literature; the author . . . treats Holocaust art with sensitivity, introspection, respect, and humanity in a clear, readable, and elegant prose. Gubar's book will prove to be a seminal work in Holocaust studies."—H-Holocaust

From the Publisher

A sensitive and superb treatment of Holocaust literature; the author . . . treats Holocaust art with sensitivity, introspection, respect, and humanity in a clear, readable, and elegant prose. Gubar's book will prove to be a seminal work in Holocaust studies.

H-Holocaust