Textual Silence

Unreadability and the Holocaust

Jessica Lang (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

232 Seiten

2017
Rutgers University Press (Verlag)
9780813589916 (ISBN)

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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? 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.

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.

JESSICA LANG is an associate professor of English at CUNY-Baruch College in New York, where she is the founding Newman Director of the Wasserman Jewish Studies Center.

Introduction 1
1 Readability and Unreadability: A Fractured Dialogue 9

Part I
Generational Differences in Holocaust Literature
2 Before, During, and After: Reading and the Eyewitness 35
3 Reading to Belong: Second-Generation and the Audience of Self 58
4 The Third Generation’s Holocaust: The Story of Time and Place 87

Part II
Pushed to the Edges: The Holocaust in American Fiction
5 American Fiction and the Act of Genocide 119
6 Receding into the Distance: The Holocaust as Background 155
Afterword: Reading the Fragments of Memory 175

Acknowledgments 179
Notes 181
Bibliography 199
Index 209

Erscheinungsdatum	28.09.2017
Zusatzinfo	10 photographs
Verlagsort	New Brunswick NJ
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	295 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Judentum
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
ISBN-13	9780813589916 / 9780813589916
Zustand	Neuware