A Genre of Rupture: The Literary Language of the Holocaust
Document Type
Contribution to Book
Publication Date
2014
Abstract
Holocaust narrative, in drawing from two vital traditions of Jewish expression, midrash and lamentation, constitutes a genre of rupture that creates, extends and responds to the trauma of the Shoah. In doing so, Holocaust texts call upon literary and cultural traditions as a framework for the ongoing response to the devastation of the Holocaust, all the while creating within this responsive framework an interpretative reconfiguration of conventional forms of expression. Such narratives, this chapter argues, produce the effects of disequilibrium and estrangement that represent the enormity of the trauma of the Holocaust, inviting the reader to participate in an ethical act of reading and bearing witness. Such literary modes of representation create a language and a landscape of rupture, of discursive disequilibrium, and of narrative disjunction in an attempt to enact the very conditions they evoke. The convergence of historiography and literary invention in Holocaust writing lends itself to wide-ranging texts that call upon diverse discursive strategies and forms that engage in the strategic performance of rhetorical destabilization.
Editor
Jenni Adams
Identifier
10.5040/9781472593801.ch-001
Publisher
Bloomsbury Academic
City
London
ISBN
9781474296311, 9781441129086
Repository Citation
Aarons, V. (2014). A genre of rupture: The literary language of the Holocaust. In J. Adams (Eds.), The Bloomsbury companion to Holocaust literature (pp. 27-46). Bloomsbury Academic.
Publication Information
The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature