Romanticism After Auschwitz [Hardcover]

Romanticism After Auschwitzreveals how post-Holocaust testimony remains romantic, and shows why romanticism must therefore be rethought. The book argues that what literary historians have traditionally called romanticism, and characterized as a literary movement stretching roughly between 1785 and 1832, should be redescribed in light of two circumstances. The first is the specific inadequacy of literary-historical models before romantic works. The second is the particular function that these unsettling aspects of romantic works have after Auschwitz. The book demonstrates that certain figures (of speech, writing, and argument) central to normative accounts of romanticism, serve in their most radicalmost genuinely romantic form as vehicles for posing a conception of life (and death) revealed in the camps. In these pages, Agamben meets Wordsworth, Shakespeare meets Celan, film meets lyric poetry, survivors' accounts meet fiction, de Man encounters Nancy. The book offers new readings of highly canonical worksMary Shelley'sFrankenstein, Wordsworth and Coleridge'sLyrical Ballads, Alain Resnais'sNight and Fogand introduces unfamiliar texts. It elaborates a fascinating account of the rhetoric of ethical dispositions and gives its readers an attentive, moving way of understanding the condition of human survival after the Holocaust. At a time when studies of the field remain predominantly structured by historicist paradigms,Romanticism after Auschwitzdemonstrates that romanticism cannot be bound by periodization, that it simply remains good to think with. Any reader of Guyer's sober, poignant argument that lyric figure bears witness to a survival that is neither redemptive nor privative will come away from this book both sadder and wiser. This is a bracing, brilliant book. In compelling fashion Guyer weaves back and forth between Romantic literature and culture in the aftermath of Auschwitz. She uncovers untold dynamics ilS*