The Witness of Poetry: Holocaust Representation in Abraham Sutzkever and David Fram

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 34-48
Author(s):  
Hazel Frankel
Keyword(s):  
Holocaust Representation

The Ethics of Narration in Helen Demidenko's The Hand That Signed the Paper, 1994 and 2017

AJS Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 368-383
Author(s):  
Peter Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Narrative Ethics ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Holocaust Representation ◽  
The Status ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Made In

During the mid-1990s the Australian literary scene was shaken by controversy over issues of antisemitism and Holocaust representation in Helen Demidenko's debut novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper. In 2017, Darville reissued the novel. At a time when debate is raging over the nature and limits of freedom of expression and the status of words and facts, this was a provocative move. This article revisits The Hand in order to resolve the issues of literary antisemitism and freedom of speech that it raised in 1994 and continues to raise today. I apply Avishai Margalit's notion of an “ethics of memory” to the autofictional text in order to develop a theory of an “ethics of narration” in literary fiction. This narrative ethics enables distinctions to be made in relation to truth claims and fictionality, which were opaque in Demidenko's original autofiction and remain unresolved in the reissued version.

scholarly journals Embodying the Auschwitz Sonderkommando in extreme metal

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Williams
Keyword(s):  
Acting Out ◽  
Music Genres ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
Holocaust Representation ◽  
Extreme Metal ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Musical Styles

Prompted by the Meads of Asphodel album Sonderkommando (2013), this article considers ways in which the Auschwitz Sonderkommando (SK) figure in extreme metal. While there are not many metal songs about the SK, they feature far more in metal lyrics than in almost all other music genres. Attracted by obscure and difficult parts of history, metal bands draw on their practices to ‘embody’ the SK: not simply representing them, but feeling and acting out their plight to excess. The article examines a number of these practices: difficult to decipher vocals, the use of global Englishes and a bookish attraction to the arcane and the bizarre. It argues that metal’s embrace of intense feeling in the lyrics and vocal and musical styles can be interpreted as an exploration of embodiment and materiality, allowing a consideration of mediation, the matter through which the SK might be felt and understood. Embodying the SK in metal, then, does not merely comprise an eccentric example of Holocaust memory at work, but takes on central issues of Holocaust representation.

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