History, literature, critical theory / Dominick LaCapra.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

LaCapra, Dominick, 1939-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fiction--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Fiction.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Historiography.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945).

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature.

Literature and history.

Literature, Modern--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Literature, Modern.

Violence in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (248 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, c2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In History, Literature, Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his exploration of the complex relations between history and literature, here considering history as both process and representation. A trio of chapters at the center of the volume concern the ways in which history and literature (particularly the novel) impact and question each other. In one of the chapters LaCapra revisits Gustave Flaubert, pairing him with Joseph Conrad. Other chapters pair J. M. Coetzee and W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, and Saul Friedlander's two-volume, prizewinning history Nazi Germany and the Jews. A recurrent motif of the book is the role of the sacred, its problematic status in sacrifice, its virulent manifestation in social and political violence (notably the Nazi genocide), its role or transformations in literature and art, and its multivalent expressions in "postsecular" hopes, anxieties, and quests. LaCapra concludes the volume with an essay on the place of violence in the thought of Slavoj Zizek. In LaCapra's view Zizek's provocative thought "at times has uncanny echoes of earlier reflections on, or apologies for, political and seemingly regenerative, even sacralized violence."

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1. The Mutual Interrogation of History and Literature

2. The Quest! The Quest! Conrad and Flaubert

3. Coetzee, Sebald, and the Narrative of Trauma

4. Historical and Literary Approaches to the "Final Solution": Saul Friedländer and Jonathan Littell

5. The Literary, the Historical, and the Sacred: The Question of Nazism

Epilogue Recent Figurations of Trauma and Violence: Tarrying with Žižek

Notes

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher.

ISBN:

0-8014-6776-4

0-8014-5197-3

0-8014-6777-2

OCLC:

840897779