| Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew Contributor(s): Gubar, Susan (Author) |
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ISBN: 025321887X ISBN-13: 9780253218872 Publisher: Indiana University Press OUR PRICE: $31.68 Product Type: Paperback Published: October 2006 Annotation: In this pathbreaking study Susan Gubar demonstrates that Theodor Adorno's famous injunction against writing poetry after Auschwitz paradoxically inspired an ongoing literary tradition. From the 1960s to the present, as the Shoah receded into a more remote European past, North American and British writers struggled to keep its memory alive. Many contemporary writers, among them Anthony Hecht, Gerald Stem, Sylvia Plath, William Heyen, Michael Hamburger, Irena Klepfisz, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Jacqueline Osherow, and Anne Michaels, grappled with personal and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the disaster. Through confessional verse and reinventions of the elegy, as well as documentary poems about photographs and trials, poets serve as proxy-witnesses of events that they did not experience firsthand. By speaking about or even as the dead, these men and women of letters elucidate what it means to cite, reconfigure, consume, or envy the traumatic memories of an earlier generation. As the testimonies of eyewitnesses come to a close, this moving meditation by a major feminist critic finds in poetry a stimulant to empathy that can help us take to heart what we forget at our own peril. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Poetry - Literary Criticism | Jewish - History | Holocaust |
| Dewey: 811.540 |
| Series: Jewish Literature & Culture (Paperback) |
| Physical Information: 0.89" H x 5.02" W x 9.52" (1.14 lbs) 340 pages |
| Themes: - Ethnic Orientation - Jewish - Topical - Holocaust |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In this pathbreaking study, Susan Gubar demonstrates that Theodor Adorno's famous injunction against writing poetry after Auschwitz paradoxically inspired an ongoing literary tradition. From the 1960s to the present, as the Shoah receded into a more remote European past, many contemporary writers grappled with personal and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the disaster. By speaking about or even as the dead, these poets tell what it means to cite, reconfigure, consume, or envy the traumatic memories of an earlier generation. This moving meditation by a major feminist critic finds in poetry a stimulant to empathy that can help us take to heart what we forget at our own peril. |