The Conflagration of Community
eBook - ePub

The Conflagration of Community

Fiction before and after Auschwitz

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Conflagration of Community

Fiction before and after Auschwitz

About this book

"After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric." The Conflagration of Community challenges Theodor Adorno's famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. J. Hillis Miller masterfully considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake.

Miller juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust—Keneally's Schindler's List, McEwan's Black Dogs, Spiegelman's Maus, and KertĂ©sz's Fatelessness—with Kafka's novels and Morrison's Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, Miller questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz—a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust—and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The Conflagration of Community is an eloquent study of literature's value to fathoming the unfathomable.

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Yes, you can access The Conflagration of Community by J. Hillis Miller in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Jewish Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Contents
  3. Preface
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. Part One | Theories of Community
  6. 1 Nancy contra Stevens
  7. Part Two | Franz Kafka: Premonitions of Auschwitz
  8. 2 Foreshadowings of Auschwitz in Kafka’s Writings
  9. 3 The Breakdown of Community and the Disabling of Speech Acts in Kafka’s The Trial
  10. 4 The Castle: No Mitsein, No Verifiable Interpretation
  11. Part Three | Holocaust Novels
  12. Prologue: Community in Fiction after Auschwitz
  13. 5 Three Novels about the Shoah
  14. 6 Imre KertĂ©sz’s Fatelessness: Fiction as Testimony
  15. Part Four | Fiction after Auschwitz
  16. 7 Morrison’s Beloved
  17. Coda
  18. Notes
  19. Index of Names, Titles of Works, and Characters