The Role of Theories of Memory in Teaching Representations of the Holocaust

Abstract

In common with other colleagues in English studies, my route to teaching Holocaust representations has been an indirect one. My research interests in theories of trauma and memory inevitably led to an engagement with literature of the Holocaust; as Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg point out in their recent volume The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003), “the politics of memory” is one of the main areas in which theory after the Holocaust has been elaborated (3). Questions of memory and representation are inextricable from thinking about the Holocaust, not least because of the often claimed “unthinkability” of the event. My teaching accordingly incorporates a range of theoretical engagements with memory, in order to contextualize and to frame the readings of texts. I draw on ideas of traumatic memory in teaching the literature of the survivors; this material helps to link the suffering of the individual with the broader, collective experience. In teaching the work of the generation(s) after, I turn to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,” which helps students to understand the ways in which individuals can be haunted by, and define their identities in relation to, events that they have not themselves experienced.