Research Explorer

Project

Postmemory and Postmodern: Traumatic History and the Poetics of Absence in Recent Jewish American Novels
Code
01P01007
Duration
01 October 2007 → 30 September 2011
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • Language studies
    • Literary studies
    • Theory and methodology of language studies
    • Theory and methodology of linguistics
    • Theory and methodology of literary studies
    • Other languages and literary studies
Keywords
postmodern Jewish-American literature trauma history postmemory third generation English literature Literary studies
 
Project description

This project investigates the ways in which postmodern historiographic metafiction, by its embrace of a poetics of absence, is employed for postmemorial purposes by Jewish American third generation authors after the Shoah, such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Michael Chabon. Their Holocaust novels paradoxically escape the lure of traditional historiography’s desire for emplotment, teleology, and closure of trauma.