Dossier K

Dossier K
Author: Imre Kertész
Publisher: Melville House
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1612192033

The first and only memoir from the Nobel Prize–winning author, in the form of an illuminating, often funny, and often combative interview—with himself Dossier K. is Imre Kertész’s response to the hasty biographies and profiles that followed his 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature—an attempt to set the record straight. The result is an extraordinary self-portrait, in which Kertész interrogates himself about the course of his own remarkable life, moving from memories of his childhood in Budapest, his imprisonment in Nazi death camps and the forged record that saved his life, his experiences as a censored journalist in postwar Hungary under successive totalitarian communist regimes, and his eventual turn to fiction, culminating in the novels—such as Fatelessness, Fiasco, and Kaddish for an Unborn Child—that have established him as one of the most powerful, unsentimental, and imaginatively daring writers of our time. In this wide-ranging and provocative book, Kertész continues to delve into the questions that have long occupied him: the legacy of the Holocaust, the distinctions drawn between fiction and reality, and what he calls “that wonderful burden of being responsible for oneself.”

Punctuations

Punctuations
Author: Michael J. Shapiro
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2019-11-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1478007265

In Punctuations Michael J. Shapiro examines how punctuation—conceived not as a series of marks but as a metaphor for the ways in which artists engage with intelligibility—opens pathways for thinking through the possibilities for oppositional politics. Drawing on Theodor Adorno, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Roland Barthes, Shapiro demonstrates how punctuation's capacity to create unexpected rhythmic pacing makes it an ideal tool for writers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists to challenge structures of power. In works ranging from film scores and jazz compositions to literature, architecture, and photography, Shapiro shows how the use of punctuation reveals the contestability of dominant narratives in ways that prompt readers, viewers, and listeners to reflect on their acceptance of those narratives. Such uses of punctuation, he theorizes, offer models for disrupting structures of authority, thereby fostering the creation of alternative communities of sense from which to base political mobilization.

Author:
Publisher: Odile Jacob
Total Pages: 210
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 2738189660

Textual Silence

Textual Silence
Author: Jessica Lang
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2017-08-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813589940

There are thousands of books that represent the Holocaust, but can, and should, the act of reading these works convey the events of genocide to those who did not experience it? In Textual Silence, literary scholar Jessica Lang asserts that language itself is a barrier between the author and the reader in Holocaust texts—and that this barrier is not a lack of substance, but a defining characteristic of the genre. Holocaust texts, which encompass works as diverse as memoirs, novels, poems, and diaries, are traditionally characterized by silences the authors place throughout the text, both deliberately and unconsciously. While a reader may have the desire and will to comprehend the Holocaust, the presence of “textual silence” is a force that removes the experience of genocide from the reader’s analysis and imaginative recourse. Lang defines silences as omissions that take many forms, including the use of italics and quotation marks, ellipses and blank pages in poetry, and the presence of unreliable narrators in fiction. While this limits the reader’s ability to read in any conventional sense, these silences are not flaws. They are instead a critical presence that forces readers to acknowledge how words and meaning can diverge in the face of events as unimaginable as those of the Holocaust.

A Thousand Darknesses

A Thousand Darknesses
Author: Ruth Franklin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2010-11-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199779775

What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be 'truthful'--that is, faithful to the facts of history? Or is it okay to lie in such works? In her provocative study A Thousand Darknesses, Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of Holocaust fiction, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's postmodernist family history. Franklin argues that the memory-obsessed culture of the last few decades has led us to mistakenly focus on testimony as the only valid form of Holocaust writing. As even the most canonical texts have come under scrutiny for their fidelity to the facts, we have lost sight of the essential role that imagination plays in the creation of any literary work, including the memoir. Taking a fresh look at memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and examining novels by writers such as Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, W.G. Sebald, and Wolfgang Koeppen, Franklin makes a persuasive case for literature as an equally vital vehicle for understanding the Holocaust (and for memoir as an equally ambiguous form). The result is a study of immense depth and range that offers a lucid view of an often cloudy field.

Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction

Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction
Author: Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 2857
Release: 2019-01-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 3110381486

Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.

Durchblicke

Durchblicke
Author: Daniel Boyarin
Publisher: Neofelis Verlag
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 395808060X

Jüdische Kulturgeschichte ist alles andere als ein festgelegtes Forschungsgebiet, sondern setzt sich aus vielen und immer neuen Fragestellungen zusammen: Da geht es um Philosophie, Religion, Geschichte, Literatur, Gesellschaft und Politik – und bei all dem um Würde und Ethik, um Zuschreibungen und Ausgrenzungen, um Machtstrukturen und um Verfolgung. Jüdische Geschichte, Lebensrealitäten und Identitätsbildungen spielen in der europäischen und globalen Geschichte eine wichtige Rolle. Mitunter fanden diese Themen in der Geisteswissenschaft nur wenig Beachtung, doch ist hier inzwischen einiges im Umbruch. Statt bekannten Wegen tun sich neue Horizonte auf! Durchblicke. Horizonte jüdischer Kulturgeschichte enthält die Beiträge des Symposiums zum zehnjährigen Bestehen des Zentrums für Jüdische Kulturgeschichte der Universität Salzburg. Diese setzen Akzente in etlichen Bereichen der Jüdischen Studien: in der kulturwissenschaftlichen Sicht auf Judentum, Christentum und Islam in der Spätantike, der jüdischen Geschichte und Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, der Sprachlosigkeit und des künstlerischen und literarischen Zeugnisses angesichts des Holocaust und nicht zuletzt der jiddischen Literatur und Kultur.

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond
Author: Stephanie Bird
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2016-02-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1474241875

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond explores the complex and diverse reverberations of the Second World War after 1945. It focuses on the legacies that National Socialist violence and genocide perpetrated in Europe continue to have in German-speaking countries and communities, as well as among those directly affected by occupation, terror and mass murder. Furthermore it explores how those legacies are in turn shaped by the present. The volume also considers conflicting, unexpected and often dissonant interpretations and representations of these events, made by those who were the witnesses, victims and perpetrators at the time and also by different communities in the generations that followed. The contributions, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, enrich our understanding of the complexity of the ways in which a disturbing past continues to disrupt the present and how the past is in turn disturbed and instrumentalized by a later present.

Background to Danger

Background to Danger
Author: Eric Ambler
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2011-10-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307949931

Kenton's career as a journalist depended on his facility with languages, his knowledge of European politics, and his quick judgment. Where his judgment sometimes failed him was in his personal life. When he finds himself on a train bound for Austria with insufficient funds after a bad night of gambling, he jumps at the chance to earn a fee to help a refugee smuggle securities across the border. He soon discovers that the documents he holds have a more than monetary value, and that European politics has more twists and turns than the most convoluted newspaper account.

The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust

The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust
Author: Grzegorz Niziolek
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2019-05-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350039675

Grzegorz Niziolek's The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust is a pioneering analysis of the impact and legacy of the Holocaust on Polish theatre and society from 1945 to the present. It reveals the role of theatre as a crucial medium of collective memory – and collective forgetting – of the trauma of the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis on Polish soil. The period gave rise to two of the most radical and influential theatrical ideas during work on productions that addressed the subject of the Holocaust – Grotowski's Poor Theatre and Kantor's Theatre of Death - but the author examines a deeper impact in the role that theatre played in the processes of collective disavowal to being a witness to others' suffering. In the first part, the author examines six decades of Polish theatre shaped by the perspective of the Holocaust in which its presence is variously visible or displaced. Particular attention is paid to the various types of distortion and the effect of 'wrong seeing' enacted in the theatre, as well as the traces of affective reception: shock, heightened empathy, indifference. In part two, Niziolek examines a range of theatrical events, including productions by Leon Schiller, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Warlikowski and Ondrej Spišák. He considers how these productions confronted the experience of bearing witness and were profoundly shaped by the legacy of the Holocaust. The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust reveals how -- by testifying about society's experience of the Holocaust -- theatre has been the setting for fundamental processes taking place within Polish culture as it confronts suppressed traumatic wartime experiences and a collective identity shaped by the past.