Daniel R. Schwarz. Imagining the Holocaust. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. 353 pp.
If good scholarship is supposed to be disciplined, detached, and objective, the study of the Holocaust has taught us that mental, emotional, and physical reactions—even when experienced from a temporal and spatial distance, and consciously or not—condition our conceptualized or poetic responses to t...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Pennsylvania Press
2002
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| In: |
AJS review
Year: 2002, Volume: 26, Issue: 1, Pages: 188-194 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | If good scholarship is supposed to be disciplined, detached, and objective, the study of the Holocaust has taught us that mental, emotional, and physical reactions—even when experienced from a temporal and spatial distance, and consciously or not—condition our conceptualized or poetic responses to the Shoah. This unarticulated psychic involvement in our recent past is perhaps the place that generates intellectual, political, ideological, and imaginative expressions. Moreover, this location signifies the meeting point of ethics and aesthetics that makes any verbal or visual attempt to convey the unspeakable and unimaginable possible, while at the same time being the very site that causes the collapse of the boundaries between objective and subjective response. How can it be otherwise? The impact of this recognition is such that even general literary, cultural, and philosophic writing, mostly influenced by Holocaust studies, has begun to consider ethics as an analytic category.1. See, for example, Howard Marchitello, ed. What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). Daniel Schwarz's Imagining the Holocaust is positioned at the core of this ethical-aesthetic matrix. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4541 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0364009402540046 |