Worlds apart : genre and the ethics of representing camps, ghettos, and besieged cities / Benjamin Paloff.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Paloff, Benjamin, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Internment camps in literature.

Survival in literature.

Internment camp inmates' writings--History and criticism.

Internment camp inmates' writings.

Holocaust survivors' writings--History and criticism.

Holocaust survivors' writings.

Autobiographical memory in literature.

Truth in literature.

Literature and history.

Genre:

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

xiii, 254 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2025]

Summary:

"Worlds Apart examines literary texts by authors who survived spaces of violent, open confinement--the concentration camps, ghettos, and besieged cities that remain at the forefront of cultural memory surrounding the middle decades of the last century--but who, rather than write straightforward memoirs or testimonials about what they lived through, chose instead to fictionalize their experiences. By manipulating narrative time and point of view and altering biographical facts, major writers like Gustaw Herling Grudziński (Poland), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Russia), and Jiří Weil (Czechoslovakia) produced literary texts that problematize not only Western notions of genre but also our sense of what constitutes an appropriate, ethically sound representation of collective trauma, particularly as we move deeper into a new century where there will no longer be living witnesses to these events. Paloff argues that the popular reception of this literature has been fundamentally flawed, particularly in its failure to disentangle factual elements that pertain to a particular individual's historically delimited experiences from fictional elements that universalize that experience. At the heart of the book are persistent questions about what constitutes 'truth' in historical representation, literature, and the popular imagination. Through a cross-cultural treatment of the problem that spaces of open confinement pose to literary representation, Paloff demonstrates how this literature is almost always oriented toward the present, offering a simulation of life within a cultural institution that is as much a component of contemporary society as the school, the bank, or the clinic, but that most of us will never experience for ourselves"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Have we been misreading the camps? (an introduction)

Fraud

Parabiography

Real-life fiction

Comedy

Horror

Why read camp literature? (a conclusion).

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-244) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Paloff, Benjamin. Worlds apart

ISBN:

9780231215107

023121510X

9780231215114

0231215118

OCLC:

1473688338