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Born under Auschwitz (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)
Mary Cosgrove
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Description for Born under Auschwitz (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)
Hardcover.
Uncovers the literary traditions of melancholy that inform major works of postwar and contemporary German literature dealing with the Holocaust and the Nazi period. In German Studies the literary phenomenon of melancholy, which has a longstanding and diverse history in European letters, has typically been associated with the Early Modern and Baroque periods, Romanticism, and the crisis of modernity. This association, alongside the dominant psychoanalytical view of melancholy in German memory discourses since the 1960s, has led to its neglect as an important literary mode in postwar German literature, a situation the present book seeks to redress by identifying and analyzing epochal postwar works that use melancholy traditions to comment on German history in the aftermath of the Holocaust. It focuses on five writers - Günter Grass, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald, and Iris Hanika - who reflect on the legacy of Auschwitz as intellectuals trying to negotiate a relationship to the past based on the stigma of belonging to a perpetrator collective (Grass, Sebald, Hanika) or, broadly speaking, to the victim collective (Weiss, Hildesheimer), in order to develop a melancholy ethics of memory for the Holocaust and the Nazi past. It will appeal to scholars and students of German Studies,Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Cultural Memory, and Holocaust Studies. Mary Cosgrove is Reader in German at the University of Edinburgh.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2014
Publisher
Camden House
Condition
New
Number of Pages
244
Place of Publication
Columbia, MD, United States
ISBN
9781571135568
SKU
V9781571135568
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Mary Cosgrove
Mary Cosgrove is Professor in German at Trinity College Dublin. Her research and teaching foci include Holocaust memory and representation in literature and culture; German Jewish writing; the cultural history and theory of melancholia and boredom in European letters; and literary and narrative economics. Key publications include Born under Auschwitz: Melancholy Traditions in Postwar German Literature (Camden House, 2014); German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990 (Camden House, 2006; paperback 2010).
Reviews for Born under Auschwitz (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)
[D]etailed and cogent . . . . Throughout the study, textual analysis is enhanced by careful attention to the literary, political, and cultural context, and by details drawn from archival material about the writers' knowledge and discussion of melancholy traditions. Cosgrove's strident engagement with earlier critical reception is particularly noteworthy, not least as her study responds to a lack of scholarly interest in post-war Holocaust memory and melancholy, an association that she shows to be worthy of further attention. . . . The monograph is an original and serious work which provides a highly detailed perspective on post-war writing about the poetics of remembrance after the Holocaust. As such, it makes an important contribution to the extensive body of recent criticism on post-war German memory culture.
MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW
[The book's] greatest contribution is to emphasize the variety of traditions at play, in particular Christian, Greek, and Renaissance modes of melancholy discourse beyond the better-known psychological and medical definition of the term, most notably as derived from Freud. . . . Recommended.
CHOICE
The [book's] greatest strength . . . is its careful and erudite analysis of a range of thematic intricacies, such as the distinctive treatments of melancholy depending on whether the narrator (or author) speaks from the perspective of the perpetrator or the victim, as a man or a woman, as an individual or a collective, etc. Clearly, Cosgrove's analysis goes along with a keen analytical grasp of the theoretical and conceptual issues involved in the problem of melancholy. . . . The book is an important, precise, and thorough study that breaks new ground and advances our understanding of a set of major German novels in the social and cultural context of memory studies. Overall this is a graceful work of remarkable erudition that will be greatly appreciated as a landmark study about both postwar German literary history and theory, and memory discourse in the humanities.
MONATSHEFTE
Cosgrove compels her readers to identify contemporary literary works that, through engagement in subversive melancholy traditions, are able to stave o? inauthentic and indi?erent means of mourning and remembrance of the Holocaust . . . . Scholars of environmental, gender, German, and Holocaust Studies will ?nd this volume . . . to be a catalyst for renewed close readings and an engaging impulse for future research.
SYMPOSIUM
MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW
[The book's] greatest contribution is to emphasize the variety of traditions at play, in particular Christian, Greek, and Renaissance modes of melancholy discourse beyond the better-known psychological and medical definition of the term, most notably as derived from Freud. . . . Recommended.
CHOICE
The [book's] greatest strength . . . is its careful and erudite analysis of a range of thematic intricacies, such as the distinctive treatments of melancholy depending on whether the narrator (or author) speaks from the perspective of the perpetrator or the victim, as a man or a woman, as an individual or a collective, etc. Clearly, Cosgrove's analysis goes along with a keen analytical grasp of the theoretical and conceptual issues involved in the problem of melancholy. . . . The book is an important, precise, and thorough study that breaks new ground and advances our understanding of a set of major German novels in the social and cultural context of memory studies. Overall this is a graceful work of remarkable erudition that will be greatly appreciated as a landmark study about both postwar German literary history and theory, and memory discourse in the humanities.
MONATSHEFTE
Cosgrove compels her readers to identify contemporary literary works that, through engagement in subversive melancholy traditions, are able to stave o? inauthentic and indi?erent means of mourning and remembrance of the Holocaust . . . . Scholars of environmental, gender, German, and Holocaust Studies will ?nd this volume . . . to be a catalyst for renewed close readings and an engaging impulse for future research.
SYMPOSIUM