“Sometimes Your Memories Are Not Your Own”: The Graphic Turn and the Future of Holocaust Representation

“The legacy of the Shoah” writes Eva Hoffman, a child of Holocaust survivors, “is being passed on to … the post-generation … The inheritance … is being placed in our hands, perhaps in our trust.” We are entering an era that will witness the end of direct survivor testimony. As we move farther and farther from the events of the Shoah, subsequent generations, who see their own lives shaped by the defining rupture of the past, continue to respond to the call of memory. The current era has seen a burgeoning of Holocaust literary representation in the evolving genre of graphic novels, narratives that reanimate and materialize the past through the juxtapositions and intersections of text and image. Calling upon the Deuteronomic imperative to “teach your children,” second and third-generation Holocaust writers, through the hybrid form of the graphic novel, attempt to give shape to the traumatic imprint of the Shoah and its haunting aftermath for generations extending beyond that history.

Language, narrative, self, and memory in two language memoirs: Eva Hoffman’s "Lost in Translation" and Ilan Stavans’s "On Borrowed Words"

This article focuses on two memoirs authored by a bilingual and a multilingual author – Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation and Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed Words, respectively – to examine how their authors construct their linguistic selves, what they tell us about living in two (or more) languages, and how the process of recalling their past contributes to the construction of their self and what the role of language is in that process. The first part of the essay shows that language, narrative, memory, and self are mutually dependent and constitutive, and that memory, especially in its individual manifestation, is not given enough attention in autobiographical research. The second part examines how the interplay between these four concepts is captured in the memoirs of Eva Hoffman and Ilan Stavans. Both authors show what it means to be trapped in the space between languages, when one feels that no language adequately captures the events of the everyday life, and how it influences the sense of self and the formation of memories.

Genetics and the Literary Imagination

This book explores the impact of genetic and postgenomic science on British literary fiction over the last four decades, focusing on the challenge posed to novelists by gene-centric neo-Darwinism and examining the recent rapprochement between postgenomic perspectives and literary understandings of human nature. It assesses the rise to cultural prominence of neo-Darwinism in the form of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, thought styles which were predicated on scientific reductionism and genetic determinism. It explores the ways in which the fiction of Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, and Ian McEwan critiques neo-Darwinism but also registers the extent to which these writers are persuaded by the neo-Darwinian view of human behaviour as driven by genetic self-interest. It goes on to consider the ‘new biology’ that emerged around the turn of the millennium, as gene-centrism was displaced by a more dynamic and holistic view of the development and function of living organisms. It reads the work of Eva Hoffman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Drabble, and Jackie Kay as converging with this shift in which the organism is reconfigured as agentic and self-organizing but caught up in complex co-dependencies with other organisms. The archetypal postgenomic science of epigenetics is crucial in facilitating this change, disclosing the ways in which the genome is constantly modified in response to environmental cues and sponsoring a view of identity in terms of plasticity and mutability, a view more congenial to many writers than the concept of genetic predetermination.

Matrophobia and Uncanny Kinship: Eva Hoffman’s The Secret

Eva Hoffman, known primarily for her autobiography of exile, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989), is also the author of a work of Gothic science fiction, set in the future. The Secret: A Fable for our Time (2001) is narrated by a human clone, whose discovery that she is the “monstrous” cloned offspring of a single mother emerges with growing discomfort at the uncanny similarities and tight bonds between her and her mother. This article places Hoffman’s use of the uncanny in relation to her understanding of Holocaust history and the condition of the postmemory generation. Relying on Freud’s definition of the uncanny as being “both very alien and deeply familiar,” she insists that “the second generation has grown up with the uncanny.” In The Secret, growing up with the uncanny leads to matrophobia, a strong dread of becoming one’s mother. This article draws on theoretical work by Adrienne Rich and Deborah D. Rogers to argue that the novel brings to “the matrophobic Gothic” specific insights into the uncanniness of second-generation experiences of kinship, particularly kinship between survivor mothers and their daughters.

Identidade e construção de Autoria em uma Língua Adicional: as memórias ou autobiografias de linguagem

<p> Grande parte da literatura contemporânea é escrita em uma língua adicional. Muitas dessas obras produzidas em língua inglesa são de cunho autobiográfico ou memorial, enfatizando aspectos relacionados ao aprendizado de uma língua adicional e a posterior transformação dessa língua em uma língua de escrita, ou seja, à construção de uma autoria em uma língua adicional. Essas narrativas revelam e discutem o efeito de uma língua adicional sobre a primeira e sobre a identidade do sujeito ao tematizar o exílio e fazer dele matéria prima para a escrita. Nesse contexto, este artigo tem por objetivo apresentar e discutir o conceito de memórias ou autobiografias de linguagem e exemplificar tal conceito a partir da obra: <em>Lost in Translation </em>da escritora canadense Eva Hoffman.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p> </p>

From „neither this nor that” to „a stereoscopic and stereophonic attitude to the world”: writers’ attitude to bilingualism

The article examines the problem of bilingualism from a diachronic perspective in the context of the contribution of current cultural theories (gender, postcolonial) to the perception of multilingualism in contemporary culture. A distinct issue in this research is compulsory bilingualism caused by the Holocaust and involuntary resettlement processes resulting from political harassment. The article also emphasizes the import of cultural anthropology, cognitive sciences and the sociology of translation into the redefi nition of the very notion of bilingualism and the infl uence of this phenomenon on such remote from literature spheres as therapy. Refl ection on bilingualism is largely dependent on the intellectual capacity of the bilingual authors conducting self-analysis. The cases of Eva Hoffman and Anna Wierzbicka provide more than adequate evidence which signifi cantly complements the testimony of philosophers, such as trilingual George Steiner, and bilingual writers, such as Conrad, Nabokov or Brodsky. Finally, it should be added that globalization favors bilingualism among authors but often also provides the rationale for choosing a less popular language as a means of expression.