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About This Book
"After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric." The Conflagration of Community challenges Theodor Adorno's famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. J. Hillis Miller masterfully considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake.
Miller juxtaposes readings of books about the HolocaustâKeneally's Schindler's List, McEwan's Black Dogs, Spiegelman's Maus, and KertĂ©sz's Fatelessness âwith Kafka's novels and Morrison's Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, Miller questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitzâa difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaustâand the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The Conflagration of Community is an eloquent study of literature's value to fathoming the unfathomable.
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Table of contents
- Title Page
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Part One | Theories of Community
- 1 Nancy contra Stevens
- Part Two | Franz Kafka: Premonitions of Auschwitz
- 2 Foreshadowings of Auschwitz in Kafkaâs Writings
- 3 The Breakdown of Community and the Disabling of Speech Acts in Kafkaâs The Trial
- 4 The Castle: No Mitsein, No Verifiable Interpretation
- Part Three | Holocaust Novels
- Prologue: Community in Fiction after Auschwitz
- 5 Three Novels about the Shoah
- 6 Imre KertĂ©szâs Fatelessness: Fiction as Testimony
- Part Four | Fiction after Auschwitz
- 7 Morrisonâs Beloved
- Coda
- Notes
- Index of Names, Titles of Works, and Characters