Holocaust Literature

Learning Outcomes

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Identify and draw upon a range of primary and secondary source materials
• Work effectively on your own and as part of a group
• Analyse complex written texts and visual material including film
• Challenge your preconceptions and offer a critical appraisal of other students’ work.
• Present your ideas as oral and written presentations

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Make connections across texts written from different perspectives
• Analyse and explain the ‘limits of representation’ in relation to Holocaust literature
• Problematise the term ‘Holocaust literature’
• Demonstrate confidence and independence of thought
• Evaluate complex material and other critical opinions of Holocaust texts

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• The aestheticisation of horror.
• The relationship between history and memory.
• The key theoretical debates surrounding the moral and representational challenges posed by the Holocaust
• Literary responses to individual and collective trauma.

This module will examine some of the most important testimony, fiction and poetry which represents the horrors of the Second World War known as the Holocaust. It will bring together memoirs of camp survivors, written from a range of perspectives, with a variety of filmic, literary and experimental texts produced, in response to the Holocaust, from the 1940s to the present day. It will focus on the limits of representation, memory and trauma, and the aestheticisation of horror.

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods include

• lectures
• seminars
• consultation hours
• individual feedback on assessed work
• group work
• visits to archives and museums. Participation on this trip/field visit is not a formal requirement of the module, though you are strongly encouraged to attend wherever possible.

Learning activities include

• reading and researching
• preparing and delivering presentations
• contributing to an online group project through the blackboard website
• Visual and textual analysis
• Formal essay

This module includes a Learning Support Hour. This is a flexible weekly contact hour, designed to support and respond to the particular cohort taking the module from year to year. This hour will include (but not be limited to) activities such as language, theory and research skills classes; group work supervisions; assignment preparation and essay writing guidance; assignment consultations; feedback and feed-forward sessions.

Innovative or special features of this module

• One of the informal learning activities will be an online blog to which you will be required to contribute. You will be assigned one week and be asked to post a summary of either your seminar presentation, the lecture or the set reading for that week. You are encouraged, but not expected, to provide constructive feedback by way of peer-assessment.

Resources & Reading list

Textbooks

Saul Friedlander, ed (1992). Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’.

Dominick LaCapra (1997). Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma.

James E. Young (1988). Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation.

Lawrence Langer (1996). Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays.

Michael R. Marrus (1987). The Holocaust in History.

Omar Bartov (1997). Murder in our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation.

Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer (2001). Between Witness and Testimony: the Holocaust and the Limits of Representation.

Robert Eaglestone (2004). The Holocaust and the Postmodern.

Assessment strategy

Assessments designed to provide informal, on-module feedback

• In-class group discussion and oral presentations
• On-going online peer-assessed group project

Formative

This is how we’ll give you feedback as you are learning. It is not a formal test or exam.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External