The Holocaust of Texts
Genocide, Literature, and Personification
232 pages
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5 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2003
Why do we so often speak of books as living, flourishing, and dying? And what is at stake when we do so? This habit of treating books as people, or personifying texts, is rampant in postwar American culture. In this bracing study, Amy Hungerford argues that such personification has become pivotal to our contemporary understanding of both literature and genocide. Personified texts, she contends, play a particularly powerful role in works where the systematic destruction of entire ethnic groups is at issue.
Hungerford examines the implications of conflating texts with people in a broad range of texts: Art Spiegelman's Maus; Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; the poetry of Sylvia Plath; Binjamin Wilkomirski's fake Holocaust memoir Fragments; and the fiction of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo. She considers the ethical consequences of this trend in the work of recent and contemporary theorists and literary critics as well, including Cathy Caruth, Jacqueline Rose, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man. What she uncovers are fundamentally flawed ideas about representation that underwrite and thus undermine powerful and commonly accepted claims about literature and identity. According to Hungerford, the personification of texts is ethically corrosive and theoretically unsound. When we exalt the literary as personal and construe genocide as less a destruction of human life than of culture, we esteem memory over learning, short-circuit debates about cultural change, lend credence to the illusion or metaphysics of presence, and limit our conception of literature and its purpose.
Ultimately, The Holocaust of Texts asks us to think more deeply about the relationship between reading, experience, and memorialization. Why, for instance, is it more important to remember acts of genocide than simply to learn about them? If literary works are truly the bearers of ontology, then what must be our conduct toward them? Considering difficult questions such as these with fresh logic, Hungerford offers us an invigorating work, one that will not only interest scholars of American and postwar literature, but students of the Holocaust and critical theory as well.
Hungerford examines the implications of conflating texts with people in a broad range of texts: Art Spiegelman's Maus; Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451; the poetry of Sylvia Plath; Binjamin Wilkomirski's fake Holocaust memoir Fragments; and the fiction of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo. She considers the ethical consequences of this trend in the work of recent and contemporary theorists and literary critics as well, including Cathy Caruth, Jacqueline Rose, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man. What she uncovers are fundamentally flawed ideas about representation that underwrite and thus undermine powerful and commonly accepted claims about literature and identity. According to Hungerford, the personification of texts is ethically corrosive and theoretically unsound. When we exalt the literary as personal and construe genocide as less a destruction of human life than of culture, we esteem memory over learning, short-circuit debates about cultural change, lend credence to the illusion or metaphysics of presence, and limit our conception of literature and its purpose.
Ultimately, The Holocaust of Texts asks us to think more deeply about the relationship between reading, experience, and memorialization. Why, for instance, is it more important to remember acts of genocide than simply to learn about them? If literary works are truly the bearers of ontology, then what must be our conduct toward them? Considering difficult questions such as these with fresh logic, Hungerford offers us an invigorating work, one that will not only interest scholars of American and postwar literature, but students of the Holocaust and critical theory as well.
Yale University: Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize
Won
"Hungerford is rightly worried by the post-war and post-Holocaust tendency to imagine the literary text as if it bore significant characteristics of persons which, she argues, structures postwar discourse about the destruction of human life. . . . This challenging book is one of the best examples of recent literary theory, asking big . . . and unconventional questions about important topics in an informed and clear-headed way.”."
“What makes Hungerford’s book so compelling? For one thing, it is tremendously ambitious, dealing with large ethical and essential questions as well as with the more parochial dilemmas of how best to read individual works of literatue. . . . The Holocaust of Texts
is that rare thing, an academic book that should be of interest both to scholars in the field and to general readers, because Hungerford has something important to say about the relationship between literature and life.”
is that rare thing, an academic book that should be of interest both to scholars in the field and to general readers, because Hungerford has something important to say about the relationship between literature and life.”
“The Holocaust of Texts reconfigures post–World War II literature, trends in trauma studies, and the strange apostrophes in deconstructive theory. Hungerford’s readings are lucid and powerful, and her insights are unexpected. This is a book that takes breathtaking risks.”<Patricia Yaeger, University of Michigan>
“This daring and polemical work unsettles a number of fundamental assumptions about literature and representation after the Holocaust. Students of postwar culture and American literature will need to engage Hungerford’s bold readings and cogent arguments.”<Marianne Hirsch, Dartmouth University>
"Hungerford offers an engaging polemic against personification, specifically, the personification of texts, which, in her assessment, leads to a denial of the specificity of personal experience and suffering."
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Personification and the Holocaust of Texts
1. Plath and Her Critics, "Writing" and Life
2. Nuclear Holocaust and the Literary Victim
3. Surviving Rego Park
4. Memorizing Memory
5. Bellow, Roth, and the Secret of Identity
Conclusion: Why Not Personify?
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Personification and the Holocaust of Texts
1. Plath and Her Critics, "Writing" and Life
2. Nuclear Holocaust and the Literary Victim
3. Surviving Rego Park
4. Memorizing Memory
5. Bellow, Roth, and the Secret of Identity
Conclusion: Why Not Personify?
Notes
Works Cited
Index
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature | General Criticism and Critical Theory
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