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The Holocaust of Texts

Genocide, Literature, and Personification

Amy Hungerford author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:13th May '03

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The Holocaust of Texts cover

Why do we so often speak of books as living, flourishing, and dying? This habit of treating books as people, or personifying texts, is rampant in postwar American culture. In this bracing study, Amy Hungerford argues that personification has become pivotal to our understanding of both literature and of genocide. Personified texts, she contends, appear frequently in works where the systematic destruction of entire ethnic groups is at issue. Hungerford examines the implications of this trend in a broad range of texts: Art Spiegelman's "Maus"; Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451"; the poetry of Sylvia Plath; Binjamin Wilkomirski's fake Holocaust memoir "Fragments"; the fiction of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo; and the work of contemporary trauma theorists and literaty critics. Ultimately, she argues that the personification of texts in these works is ethically corrosive. When we exalt the literary as personal and construe genocide as less a destruction of human life than of culture, we esteem memory over learning, short-circuit debates about cultural extinction, and drastically limit our conception of literature and its purpose.

"The Holocaust of Texts reconfigures post-World War II literature, trends in trauma studies, and the strange apostrophes in deconstructive theory. Hungerford's readings are lucid and powerful, and her insights are unexpected. This is a book that takes breathtaking risks." - Patricia Yaeger, University of Michigan

ISBN: 9780226360768

Dimensions: 24mm x 16mm x 2mm

Weight: 454g

232 pages