Representing Childhood And Atrocity

Examines the ways in which writers and artists have attempted to address children's experience of atrocity.

Atrocity presents a problem to the writer of children's literature. To represent events of such terrible magnitude and impersonal will as the Holocaust, the transatlantic slave trade, or the Rwandan genocide such that they fit into a three-act structure with a comprehensible moral and a happy ending is to do a disservice to the victims. Yet to confront children with the fact of widescale violence without resolution is to confront them with realities that may be emotionally disturbing and even damaging. Despite these challenges, however, there exists a considerable body of work for and about children that addresses atrocity. To examine the ways in which writers and artists have attempted to address children's experience of atrocity, this collection brings together original essays by an international group of scholars working in the fields of child studies, children's literature, comics studies, education, English literature, and Holocaust, genocide, and memory studies. It covers a broad geographical range and includes works by established authors and emerging voices.

This work examines how the Holocaust is represented in fiction for children and young adults. Kokkola takes on the perspective of the contemporary child, who lacks personal knowledge of the Holocaust, and explores how the unspeakable can be represented for young readers. She also questions why children want to read Holocaust Fiction and how they negotiate the boundary between fact and fiction.

This book examines portrayals of political and psychological trauma, particularly sexual trauma, in the work of seven American women writers. Concentrating on novels by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Hopkins, Gayl Jones, Leslie Marmon Silko, Dorothy Allison, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood, Horvitz investigates whether memories of violent and oppressive trauma can be preserved, even transformed into art, without reproducing that violence. The book encompasses a wide range of personal and political traumas, including domestic abuse, incest, rape, imprisonment, and slavery, and argues that an analysis of sadomasochistic violence is our best protection against cyclical, intergenerational violence, a particularly timely and important subject as we think about how to stop "hate" crimes and other forms of political and psychic oppression.

An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel’s writings, from his earliest works to his final novels. Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) was one of the most important literary voices to emerge from the Holocaust. The Nazis took the lives of most of his family, destroyed the community in which he was raised, and subjected him to ghettoization, imprisonment in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and a death march. It is remarkable not only that Wiesel survived and found a way to write about his experiences, but that he did so with elegance and profundity. His novels grapple with questions of tradition, memory, trauma, madness, atrocity, and faith. The Struggle for Understanding examines Wiesel’s literary, religious, and cultural roots and the indelible impact of the Holocaust on his storytelling. Grouped in sections on Hasidic origins, the role of the Other, theology and tradition, and later works, the chapters cover the entire span of Wiesel’s career. Books analyzed include the novels Dawn, The Forgotten, The Gates of the Forest, The Town Beyond the Wall, The Testament, The Time of the Uprooted, The Sonderberg Case, and Hostage, as well as his memoir, Night. What emerges is a portrait of Wiesel’s work in its full literary richness. Victoria Nesfield is Research Coordinator in the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York, in the United Kingdom. Philip Smith is Professor of English at the Savannah College of Art and Design Hong Kong.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic imposed immobility on large sectors of the world’s population, with confinement becoming an everyday reality. The lives of those who previously enjoyed the privileges of being ‘fast castes’ ground to a halt, while at the same time the displacement of more vulnerable populations along well-established migration corridors has been radically reduced. The result has been a recalibration of the scale of journeying, with travellers slowing down their journeys and readjusting their relationship to the proximate and nearby. This situation has provided an opportunity for those who study travel and travel writing to rethink their objects of study and approaches to them. This volume explores and historicizes the phenomenon of ‘microtravel’, designating slower journeys within a limited radius which allow, and sometimes necessitate, new forms of experiencing the world.

Explores how the USHMM and other museums and memorials both displace and disturb the memories that they are trying to commemorate. Figures of Memory examines how the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC, uses its space and the design of its exhibits to “move” its visitors to memory. From the objects and their placement to the architectural design of the building and the floor plan, the USHMM was meant to teach visitors about the Holocaust. But what Michael Bernard-Donals found is that while they learn, and remember, the Holocaust, visitors also call to mind other, sometimes unrelated memories. Partly this is because memory itself works in multidirectional ways, but partly it’s because of decisions made in the planning that led to the creation of the museum. Drawing on material from the USHMM’s institutional archive, including meeting minutes, architectural renderings, visitor surveys, and comments left by visitors, Figures of Memory is both a theoretical exploration of memory—its relation to identity, space, and ethics—and a practical analysis of one of the most discussed memorials in the United States. The book also extends recent discussions of the rhetoric of memorial sites and museums by arguing that sites like the USHMM don’t so much “make a case for” events through the act of memorialization, but actually displace memory, disturbing it—and the museum visitor—so much so that they call it into question. Memory, like rhetorical figures, moves, and the USHMM moves its visitors, figuratively and literally, both to and beyond the events the museum is meant to commemorate. Michael Bernard-Donals is Nancy Hoefs Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His books include Forgetful Memory: Representation and Remembrance in the Wake of the Holocaust, also published by SUNY Press, and Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice (coedited with Janice W. Fernheimer).

Focusing on twenty one primary texts about childhood under Nazism, this book examines how childhood in literature has changed over the years, from the Romantic writers to child slave labour in the Victorian era, the child-soldier and the impact of deportation on both the child victim and their families post-wartime. The genres covered here range from diaries, letters, comics, allegories, time-travel novels, fairy-tales and novels about the Hitler Youth. Because of its broad focus, the work will be of interest to a broad readership from survivors of World War II and their families to historians, teachers and librarians. It will also benefit those practitioners working in the areas of deportation, trauma, child-soldiering, and human rights and tolerance studies.