Holocaust Narratives: Trauma, Memory and Identity Across Generations analyzes individual multi-generational frameworks of Holocaust trauma to answer one essential question: How do these narratives change to not only transmit the trauma of the Holocaust and in the process add meaning to what is inherently an event that annihilates meaning but also construct the trauma as a connector to a past that needs to be continued in the present? Meaningless or not, unspeakable or not, unknowable or not, the trauma, in all its impossibilities and intractabilities, spawns literary and scholarly engagement on a large scale. Narrative is the key connector that structures trauma for both individual and collective.
Introduction:
Holocaust traumata and their generational legacies and emanations
Generations: structural frameworks
The dialogical nature of (collective) trauma
Trauma theory: concepts, implications, outlooks
Moving trauma theory into the generation of postmemory
Living in the aftermath: forms of trauma
Insterstices between individual and cultural trauma
Trauma as connective force
Structure of the book
Narrating the inexpressible: Wiesels Night as testimonial trendsetter
God on the gallows: doublings of faith
Trauma in the mirror: identities in the face of trauma
Paradigmatic accuser: connecting audiences
Witness in search of meaning and silence
Surviving and remembering: representing trauma in the present
The truth of fiction in Louis Begleys Wartime Lies
Narrated identities: fictionalization of self and its actual facts
Negotialo