Includes bibliographical references (p. [191]-205) and index.
Contents:
Editorial foreword / James R. Watson -- Guest foreword / Angel G. Loureiro -- Guest foreword-mapping out the mountain / Michael Pfeiffer -- Introduction. Century of extremes, century of testimony -- Women and the Holocaust -- Bearing witness -- Witnesses to pain -- Antigones -- My testimony, too -- Charlotte Delbo: the spectacle of hurt memory. Memory's mise-en-scène -- The memory of the body: the body of memory -- Fleeing from narrativity -- The testimony of the other -- "The men" and "us" -- Witness to the century / Margarete Buber-Neumann. Engendering a witness -- Margarete Buber-Neumann, exemplary witness -- Milena: the promise -- Grete Thüring, her story -- Resisting pain -- Embracing exclusion / Ruth Klüger. A German writer -- In search of "Kaddish of the Daughter" -- The Holocaust as a child's story -- "New nightmares, old ghosts": a forbidden story? -- A possible story -- Marguerite Duras: witness to the witness. Remembering the war -- Literary proofs -- Ethics and memory -- Testimony then and now: abolishing certainties -- Stories, women, and pain -- Conclusion.
Summary:
"In this book, Camila Loew analyzes four women's testimonial literary writings on the Holocaust to examine and question some of the tenets of the fields of Holocaust studies, gender studies, and testimony. Through a close reading of the works of Charlotte Delbo, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ruth Klüger, and Marguerite Duras, Loew foregrounds these authors' search for a written form to engage with their experiences of the extreme. Although each chapter contains its individual focus and features, the book possesses a unity in intention, concerns, and consequences. In the theoretical introduction that unites the four chapters, Loew eschews essentialism and revises the emergence of the field of Women and Holocaust studies from the early 1980s on, and signals some of its shortcomings. In response, and in accordance with a recent turn in various disciplines of the Humanities, Loew highlights the ethical dimension of testimony and its responsible commitment to the other. In dealing with the texts as literary testimonies--a complex genre, between literature and history,--testimony is freed from the obligation to respond to the requirements of factual truth, and becomes a privileged form to voice the traumatic event, and to symbolically explore the role of excess."--Publisher's website.
Series:
Value inquiry book series ; v. 237 Holocaust and genocide studies, HGS
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.