More than 70 years after the end of World War II, the mass atrocity of the Holocaust continues to provoke a tremendous amount of responses. Scholarship, literature, film, survivor testimonies, memorials, and museum exhibitions continue to proliferate. In this course, we will explore the difficulties of grappling with the Holocaust, and of representing mass violence. How do different types of materials--historical studies, wartime diaries, documentary and feature films, material artifacts, graphic novels and fictional accounts, interviews with survivors and writings by perpetrators, artworks, memorials at sites of Holocaust violence and far removed from Europe--provide us with windows into understanding what happened then? What kinds of representations can still make us feel or think something new? Literature will be a central focus, but readings will include history and philosophy, and we'll look at films, art, and memorials. We'll explore material from the 1940s to the present day, and from a broad range of countries. Towards the end of the semester, we may also look at responses to other genocides of the last hundred years.
- Teacher: Jeffrey Wallen