Abstract
This chapter addresses the integration of a Holocaust unit into an “Introduction to Literary Theory” course. While the first half of the course was more traditional, the second part covered Holocaust narratives from the perspective of cultural memory theory, which argues that memories of public events are mediated by language and society. Drawing on student writings and personal reflections, this chapter shows how discussing the Holocaust helped students make the critical connection between narrative and theory. The chapter concludes by arguing for learning activities that promote a critical vocabulary that asks students to continuously question how mass atrocities like the Holocaust are memorialized, and thereby forces them to inhabit the uncomfortable space between private memory and public remembrance.
I would like to thank Amy Traver, Dan Leshem, and Tarushi Sonthalia for their thorough feedback on this piece.
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Notes
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Somewhat dishearteningly, many of the same institutional struggles early pioneers in literary theory pedagogy faced over 30 years ago have not abated. If anything, the institutional strictures that gear students toward professionalization and teaching toward assessment have made the open critical exploration of texts more challenging (see, e.g., Scholes 1985; Nelson 1986; Kecht 1992; Davies 1994). There are some good examples of contemporary guides to teaching theory (see, e.g., Brown 2009).
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Young , in turn, inspired other scholars who work at the intersection of cultural memory and the Holocaust (see, e.g., Hansen-Glucklich 2014; Zelizer 1998). Both Zelizer and Hansen provide great insight into the challenges of representing the Holocaust. Hasian Jr. (2006) provides a good discussion on how Holocaust trials shape the collective memory of the Holocaust.
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A notable exception is the work done by Facing History and Ourselves , which has amassed a very robust set of educational resources related to Holocaust memory (Facing History and Ourselves 2017). Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes (2004) have also assembled an anthology that has a number of really important essays on this topic. The excellent collections on teaching the Holocaust assembled by Samuel Totten are invaluable in their own right, but the works do not touch on the problematics of how the Holocaust is shaped in cultural memory and the fraught politics of representing the Holocaust (see, e.g., Totten et al. 2002; Totten 2001; Totten and Feinberg 2001). Likewise , other works , like those of Short and Reed (2004), do not engage the problematics of Holocaust remembrance.
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In fact, one way to view Holocaust education is as a formalized way of remembrance (see, e.g., Stevick and Gross 2014).
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Though QCC’s General Education Outcomes were revised in 2016 after the course was run, this General Education Outcome has been in place since 2007.
References
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Appendix: Spring 2014 Research Paper
Appendix: Spring 2014 Research Paper
Word Count: 6–8 pages (1800–2400 word)
Peer Review Date: Tuesday, May 13
Due Date: Thursday, May 15
Introduction: The point of this paper is to synthesize different literary sources with critical theory and thereby highlight a relationship between the two texts.
Instructions: The goal of this paper is to write a 6–8 page critical analysis of two literary texts, one of which must be Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After and another Holocaust text of your choosing. You must analyze these using at least three literary theoretical texts for support. In essence, this is a compare or contrast paper, but you are using the theory to support your analysis.
You may choose three different critical modes of analysis: trauma theory, cultural memory, and the politics of representation.
Introduction Outline
Topic sentence
Introduction Text A
Introduction Text B
Thesis: comparison or contrast between the two texts
Specific thesis: How and why are these texts similar or different?
Thesis Example
Comparison: Although Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah tell the story of the Holocaust through two different media, text and film, both can be productively analyzed using trauma theory. In particular, both demonstrate the impossibility of the medium to capture the memory.
Contrast: Even though Abraham Sutzkever and Charlotte Delbo both write about their Holocaust experiences from a personal point of view, they are engaging its cultural memory in two different ways. While Sutzkever is trying to bear witness to the events around him through his poetry, Delbo is more concerned with the impossibility of ever capturing the true horror of the Holocaust.
Outline
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Introduction
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Section 1: First Author
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Theory: An introduction to the theoretical article about the text and how it relates to the thesis.
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Text: An application of the theory to the text.
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Theory: An introduction to the theoretical article about the text and how it relates to the thesis.
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Text: An application of the theory to the text.
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Theory: An introduction to the theoretical article about the text and how it relates to the thesis.
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Text: An application of the theory to the text
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Section 2: Second Author
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Repeat Section 1 outline above
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Conclusion
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Burgers, J. (2018). Teaching the Holocaust: Making Literary Theory Memorable. In: Traver, A., Leshem, D. (eds) Humanistic Pedagogy Across the Disciplines. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95025-9_9
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