Surreal Geographies
eBook - PDF

Surreal Geographies

A New History of Holocaust Consciousness

  1. 248 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Surreal Geographies

A New History of Holocaust Consciousness

About this book

Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors. In so doing, she demonstrates that the Holocaust has been understood not only through the documentary realism and postmodern fragmentation familiar to scholars but also through a surreal mode of meaning making. From an otherworldly "Planet Auschwitz" to the spare, intimate spaces of documentary interviews, Brackney shows that the humanity of victims has been produced, undermined, and guaranteed through evolving scripts for acknowledging and mourning mass violence.

Brackney offers a new look at familiar works by authors and artists such as Claude Lanzmann, W. G. Sebald, and Paul Celan, while making surprising connections to contemporary scholars like Timothy Snyder and Donna Haraway, and events such as the Space Race. In the process, she maps out a decades-long process through which transnational conventions of mourning have emerged in Western Europe, North America, and Israel, functioning to constitute Jewish victimization as "grievable life." Ultimately, she shows how the Holocaust has developed into a figure for the destabilization and reformulation of the category of humanity and the problem of mourning across difference.

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Yes, you can access Surreal Geographies by Kathryn L. Brackney in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & History of Modern Art. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. List of Illustrations
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction
  5. 1. Beyond Bearing Witness: Early Art and Literature of Holocaust Remembrance
  6. 2. Remembering “Planet Auschwitz” during the Cold War
  7. 3. Testimony and Transformation
  8. 4. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Historicizing the Limits of Representation
  9. 5. The Holocaust in Natural History
  10. Conclusion: New Shapes of Holocaust Memory in the Anthropocene
  11. Notes
  12. Selected Bibliography
  13. Index