Sounding Through Silence: Inter-Generational Voicings in Memoir, Memory, and Postmodernity
Date
2014-04-07
Authors
Bhandar, Veronica Maria Delphine
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Abstract
This thesis brings together two disciplines—creative non-fiction memoir and literary/historical critique—that seek to open avenues of discourse with regard to the legacy of the Second World War and the Holocaust for subsequent generations. Ruth Kluger’s Holocaust memoir weiter leben: Eine Jugend and its English Language version written ten years later, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, are analyzed for their postmodernist challenge to traditional notions of testimony and genre. W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants is examined for its “imagetext” constructions that act to elucidate aspects of mourning and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (dealing with the past). This thesis is a post-structuralist approach that performs, through memoir, the construction of identity/subjectivity, but it is also a journey, performed in the spirit of belated mourning, that is part of the larger historical postwar discourse regarding the inability to mourn.
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Keywords
Holocaust, Second World War, Germany, memoir