Third-Generation Holocaust Representation : Trauma, History, and Memory

Victoria Aarons, Alan L. Berger

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780810134119
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Victoria Aarons and Alan L. Berger show that Holocaust literary representation has continued to flourish—gaining increased momentum even as its perspective shifts, as a third generation adds its voice to the chorus of post-Holocaust writers. In negotiating the complex thematic imperatives and narrative conceits of the literature of these writers, this bold new work examines those structures, ironies, disjunctions, and tensions that produce a literature lamenting loss for a generation removed spatially and temporally from the extended trauma of the Holocaust. Aarons and Berger address evolving notions of "postmemoryâ€?; the intergenerational transmission of trauma; inherited memory; the psychological tensions of post-Holocaust Jewish identity; tropes of memory and the personalized narrative voice; generational dislocation and anxiety; the recurrent antagonisms of assimilation and alienation; the imaginative reconstruction of the past; and the future of Holocaust memory and representation.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. On the Periphery: The “Tangled Roots” of Holocaust Remembrance for the Third Generation
• Chapter 2. The Intergenerational Transmission of Memory and Trauma: From Survivor Writing to Post-Holocaust Representation
• Chapter 3. Third-Generation Memoirs: Metonymy and Representation in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost
• Chapter 4. Trauma and Tradition: Changing Classical Paradigms in Third-Generation Novelists
• Chapter 5. Nicole Krauss: Inheriting the Burden of Holocaust Trauma
• Chapter 6. Refugee Writers and Holocaust Trauma
• Chapter 7. “There Were Times When It Was Possible to Weigh Suffering”: Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge and the Extended Trauma of the Holocaust
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index