The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings

This anthology addresses the relationship between the events of the Nazi genocide and the intellectual concerns of contemporary literary and cultural theory in one volume. It collects together both classic and new theoretical writings. Wide in its thematic scope, it covers questions to do with: authenticity and experience; memory and trauma; historiography and the philosophy of history; fascism and Nazi antisemitism; representation and identity formation; race, gender and genocide; and the implications of the Holocaust for theories of the unconscious, ethics, politics and aesthetics. The readings, which are fully contextualized by a general introduction, section introductions and bibliographical notes, represent the work of many influental writers and theorists among them: Primo Levi; Giorgio Agamben; Hannah Arendt; Cathy Caruth; Saul Friedlander; Emmanuel Levinas; Jean-Francois Lyotard; and Theodor Adorno.