The Subject of Holocaust Fiction [Paperback]

Fictional representations of horrific events run the risk of undercutting efforts to verify historical knowledge and may heighten our ability to respond intellectually and ethically to human experiences of devastation. In this captivating study of the epistemological, psychological, and ethical issues underlying Holocaust fiction, Emily Miller Budick examines the subjective experiences of fantasy, projection, and repression manifested in Holocaust fiction and in the reader's encounter with it. Considering works by Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, Aharon Appelfeld, Michael Chabon, and others, Budick investigates how the reading subject makes sense of these fictionalized presentations of memory and trauma, victims and victimizers.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015

Emily Miller Budick holds the Ann and Joseph Edelman Chair in American Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she is also chair of the Department of English and Director of the Center for Literary Studies. Her major publications includeFiction and Historical Consciousness,Engendering Romance,Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation, andAharon Appelfeld's Fiction(IUP, 2004).

The Subject of Holocaust Fictionis a profoundly challenging work of literary criticism by a brave critic who asks us to look beyond the difficult hard facts of the Holocaust to the complex subjectivities of all those affected by it, a scholar whose final legacy to us is the insistence that the subject of humanities scholarship must ultimately and always be the human.

E. M. Budick's The Subject of Holocaust Fiction is a timely addition to the steadily growing academic canon on Holocaust fiction. . . As Budick rightly acknowledges, it is . . . self-scrutiny performed both by its writers and by its readers, that makes Holocaust fiction so important and that should ensure its future standing.

Budick (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) presents newlÓu