Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to power- ful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were never- theless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, this essay elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, it examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance. The guardianship of the Holocaust is being passed on to us. The second genera- tion is the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is being transmuted into history, or into myth. It is also the generation in which we can think about certain questions arising from the Shoah with a sense of living

/pdf/the-generation-of-postmemory-44hwrlgygw.pdf

The Generation of Postmemory

“One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany. For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau that I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July . Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life— ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.What good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs—of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead, something is still crying.”1

Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory

1. Negotiating Difficult Heritage: Introduction 2. Building Heritage: Words in Stone? 3. Demolition, Cleansing and Moving On 4. Preservation, Profanation and Image-Management 5. Accompanied Witnessing: Education, Art and Alibis 6. Cosmopolitan Memory in the City of Human Rights 7. Negotiating on the Ground(s): Guided Tours of Nazi Heritage 8. Visting Difficult Heritage 9. Unsettling Difficult Heritage

Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond

Comics—A form once considered pure junk—Is sparking interest in literary studies. I'm as amazed as anybody else by the comics boom—despite the fact that I wrote an English department dissertation that makes the passionate case that we should not ignore this innovative narrative form. Yet if there's promoting of comics, there's also confusion about categories and terms. Those of us in literary studies may think the moves obvious: making claims in the name of popular culture or in the rich tradition of word-and-image inquiry (bringing us back to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages). But comics presents problems we're still figuring out (the term doesn't settle comfortably into our grammar; nomenclature remains tricky and open to debate). The field hasn't yet grasped its object or properly posed its project. To explore today's comics we need to go beyond preestablished rubrics: we have to reexamine the categories of fiction, narrative, and historicity. Scholarship on comics—and specifically on what I will call graphic narrative—is gaining traction in the humanities. Comics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially. Comics moves forward in time through the space of the page, through its progressive counterpoint of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) alternating with gutters (empty space). Highly textured in its narrative scaffolding, comics doesn't blend the visual and the verbal—or use one simply to illustrate the other—but is rather prone to present the two nonsynchronously; a reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking for meaning. Throughout this essay, I treat comics as a medium—not as a lowbrow genre, which is how it is usually understood. However, I will end by focusing attention on the strongest genre in the field: nonfiction comics.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25501865.pdf

Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative

Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye@@@Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust

Freud and Oedipus

Languages of nature. Critical essays on science and literature

Richard Wolin. The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xxii, 375. $29.95

Barbie Zelizer. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 292. $27.50 and Andrea Liss. Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust. (Visible Evidence, number 3.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1998. Pp. xix, 152. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95

Dagmar Barnouw

Papers

Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye@@@Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust

Freud and Oedipus

Languages of nature. Critical essays on science and literature

Richard Wolin. The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xxii, 375. $29.95