Unsettling Auto/Biography: Genre Transgression in Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces (original) (raw)
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Holocaust literature and historiography in Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces
This paper examines Anne Michaels ' Fugitive Pieces (2007) in the context of Holocaust literature and historiography. It begins with an introduction to the genre of Holocaust literature and the problematic nature of 'survivor' testimony. Michaels' work is then contextualized within this body of literature. The essay goes on to examine the means through which Michaels approaches the act of writing history, specifically the recording of history through alternative means to the hegemonic historiography utilized by the Nazis.
Constructing Narrative Identities in the Holocaust Memories/Memoirs of Three Women
Hungarian Cultural Studies, 2020
Although only a decade in age separates each one from the next, the women whose life stories are discussed here represent three distinct Holocaust generations of Hungarian-speaking women. I aim to examine the recently published memories/memoirs of these three women whose narratives are all centered in the Holocaust when the deportations began in Hungary in 1944. Their personal stories are placed within a larger socio-historical context, but treat matters which come within the personal knowledge of the writer and therefore offer precisely the kind of alternative micro-history often provided by women’s narratives. All three authors also have in common that they left their homeland as young adults and hence their stories arguably belong more broadly to the most important subgenre of life writing today. While such writing is produced by both genders, writing by females predominates. My aim is, in part, to examine in the texts under discussion the three autobiographers as self-historians...
Representation, Expression and Identity. Interdisciplinary Insights on Multiculturalism, Conflict and Belonging. , 2009
My paper takes up a comparative view on individual identity as featured in two literary works that deal with traumatised Jewish youth in the aftermath of the Holocaust: Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. As I intend to show, the trauma of the Holocaust forces an arbitrary process of identity deconstruction upon the juvenile characters’ incompletely developed selves, which triggers in their adult lives a need for self-reconstruction, essentially experienced against thoroughly altered cultural, historical and geographical backgrounds. These characters’ initial flight for their lives and concurrent transgression of various national borders, with all the tribulations that they entail, will be regarded as complex steps towards mapping a physical trajectory of inner change. Ultimately, this survival journey will be retraced and re-mapped in old age in an attempt to reconstruct, negotiate and reconcile with an original identity. Indubitably, forceful migration engenders a break with former patterns of selfhood and generates a re-shifting of identity elements such as the cultural, ethnical, national, psychological and geographical. The prevalent prevailing ethnic factor is the lens through which these characters later perceive their rapidly changing time and space, while their interest in poetry, literary discourse and architecture expresses a need to assume and incorporate this change. Comparatively, this focus on ethnicity will be regarded against current views of plural identity affiliation and multiple membership, in an attempt to enquire into the extent to which these destinies strike an incipient balance between localism and cosmopolitanism, exclusion and inclusion, alterity and sameness. My purpose is to explore the physical and emotional distance between the deconstructed and reconstructed types of Jewishness as embodied by these fictional characters, and to stress the uniqueness of their physical and mental path back to themselves.
Genealogy, 2020
This article explores the problematic representation of female sufferers in works of fiction relating to the Holocaust. Specifically, I contend that modern fiction fails to engage with the moral and emotional complexity of wartime sexual compromise and instead replaces a cognitive understanding of history with a bodily connection to women's wartime pain. I do so by focusing on Heather Morris's two Holocaust-themed texts: The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) and Cilka's Journey (2019). Morris, the article contends, cannot connect to the psychological or moral reality of Cilka's wartime abuse and so instead focuses on the corporealization of her suffering. Having established the existence of the trend in Morris's fiction, the article then also addresses Morris's associated need to morally contextualise Cilka's actions. In order to maintain her connection with Cilka's body, I assert, Morris must frame Cilka's actions using the incompatible morality of the postwar present day. To provide the character with depth would block Morris's engagement with Cilka's body as a post-memorial nonwitness. This is profoundly problematic as, rather than informing our understanding of the Holocaust past, Morris merely perpetuates a view of the event that is objectifying, de-humanising and frequently misogynistic.
Memoirs in Miniature: CM/1 Forms and Fragmentary Understandings of the Holocaust
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This article examines the Care and Maintenance (CM/1) form of Paula Bettauer for what it reveals about her memories of surviving the Holocaust and her husband’s murder in Auschwitz. The record includes a personal narrative, chronologies of her employment status and vital documents, as well as other details, all of which offer a view of navigating Vienna following the Nazi annexation and later deportation of the vast majority of the city’s Jewish population. This article reports on these crucial pieces of information and analyzes various blank spaces in comprehending the Holocaust through an individual’s postwar memories.
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2011
is a collection of eleven essays in which the authors explore how the aforementioned ideas contribute to the "contemporary state of the field" (x). As Spargo notes in the Introduction, "On the Cultural Continuities of Literary Representation," in each of the text's three sections, the authors "examine how writers-whether they write as witnesses to the Holocaust or at an imaginative distance from it-articulate the shadowy borderline between fact and fiction, between event and expression, between the condition of bare life endured in atrocity and the hope of a meaningful existence" (3-4). As such, when read together, the articles in these sections draw attention to the ways in which historical representation is "culturally mediated" and to the complex relationship between writing, history, and ethics (7). The first section of After Representation, "Is the Holocaust Still to be Written?" consists of four articles, "The Holocaust, History Writing, and the Role of Fiction" by Geoffrey Hartman, "Nostalgia and the Holocaust" by Sara R. Horowitz, "Death in Language: From Mado's Mourning to the Act of Writing" by Petra Schweitzer, and "Oskar Rosenfeld and Historiographic Realism (including Sex, Shit, and Status)" by Berel Lang. In each of these essays, Spargo notes that the authors examine the "competing imperatives operative in Holocaust writing-the pull between a language of radical discontinuity (e.g., the trauma as persistent interruption) and a language that supposes the necessity of continuity (drawing upon tradition, nostalgic memory, and the resources of communal identity)" (x-xi). Hartmann evaluates many of the tensions implicit in the relationship between fiction and history, and the role of writing within this construct, while Horowitz focuses on Eva Hoffmann's Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language and the work of Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer in order to introduce the layers of nostalgia in post-Holocaust family relationships, identity con
'TELL ME LIES …': HOLOCAUST, HISTORY, IDENTITY IN THE WORKS OF
The paper is a response to what has been recognized by the film maker Clay Claiborne, the author of the 2008 documentary Vietnam: The American Holocaust, as an urgent need to face the suppressed truth about the Vietnam War as the best vantage point from which to examine the mechanism of historical repetition. The continuity of war and violence, despite declarative promises of peace and stability, is the paradox that since the WWII has increasingly engaged the attention of historians, cultural critics and commentators, and artists. In the introductory section of the paper the views are represented of those among them who come from different fields yet, like Claiborne, use the benefit of the same, post-colonial, hindsight to reach the common conclusion about the holocaust, not as a unique aberration, but as historically recurrent and culturally conditioned phenomenon. The strategies used to justify and perpetuate it -the second major focus in this part of the paper -are not limited to deliberate falsification of historical facts though, for beyond what Harold Pinter called "the thick tapestry of lies" concealing the crimes of the past, there is the willingness, generated by western myths of racial supremacy, to believe the lies and/or condone the crimes. Within this (imperialist, patriarchal) mythic tradition, a particular kind of split identity is produced by, and reproduces in its turn, the kind of violent history we tend to take for granted: I argue, along with J. Habermas, L. Friedberg, C. Nord and H. Giroux, that the factual truth will stop short of the transformative effect, political or moral, we traditionally expect from it as long as the deep-seated affective alienation from whatever has been construed as the other that constitutes this identity remains unrecognized and unattended. Confronting such forms of radical inner dissociation, considered normal or desirable in patriarchal culture, has been, at least since Shakespeare, art's ultimate raison d'étre. In the rest of the paper I provide three examples of such literary deconstructions of western identity-forming traditions: Coetzee's 197 novel Dusklands about the continuity of consciousness bringing together geographically and historically distant events: the colonial massacres of the African Hottentots and the genocidal assault on Vietnam; US, the 1966 collaborative dramatic experiment directed by Peter Brook, and its 1968 cinematic version Tell Me Lies , re-mastered and released in 2012, and Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman's 1990 play about the failure of democracy in the post-Pinochet Chile. While Coetzee reveals the incurable 'sickness of the master's soul,' making Hegel's master/slave paradigm a constant ironic reference, the governing purpose of Brook's and Dorfman's plays, I will argue, is to examine the possibilities open to drama of conquering denial and releasing the kind of sympathetic imagination crucial to the non-hierarchical 'I/Thou' relationship that used to regulate social life in archaic communities, when, according to an increasing number of scientists, biologically scripted empathy and solidarity were the only conceivable strategy of survival.