Abstract
Published in 2000, City of God is one of E.L. Doctorow’s most ambitious, complex and enigmatic novels. It revolves around the possibility of reconciliation between Judeo-Christian ethics and twentieth-century brutality, of which the Holocaust is presented as a particularly extreme example. The main purpose of this chapter is to pinpoint the nature of the novel’s engagement with the Holocaust and its ideological implications. With this in mind, the novel’s self-conscious discussion of Holocaust representation becomes a key focus of inquiry. The author’s motivations for attempting to represent its fathomless horror are also explored, bearing in mind his Jewish American background. The chapter relies on Rothberg’s theorization of traumatic realism and Hirsch’s notion of postmemory in its broader understanding.
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Ferrández San Miguel, M. (2017). “No Redress but Memory”: Holocaust Representation and Memorialization in E.L. Doctorow’s City of God . In: Martínez-Alfaro, M., Pellicer-Ortín, S. (eds) Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61759-6_10
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