Holocaust Literature

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

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

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

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

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

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
• Analyse complex written texts and visual material including film

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assessment strategy

Assessments designed to provide informal, on-module feedback

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

Summative

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

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External