View the h-holocaust Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in h-holocaust's November 1996 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in h-holocaust's November 1996 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the h-holocaust home page.
Carol Zemel wrote: "It certainly is difficult but also important to bring some analysis to our outrage and fascination at what human beings have perpetrated-- watched- and enjoyed. And to push our own responses beyond obvious moral outrage and reductive notions of good/evil, victim/perpetrator. It may be time to revise Adorno, and to declare that after Auschwitz, there must be poetry." The irony here is that Adorno's oft-cited "poetry after Auschwitz" phrase is itself made as part of an analysis-- an analysis of our reception of human suffering turned into images, literature, music, art. Adorno writes: "The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it"-- here drawing some connection between "our outrage and fascination" and "what human beings have perpetrated--watched-- and enjoyed." Therefore, Adorno's remark is an example of the kind of analysis that I believe Prof Zemel is calling for; "poetry" stands in Adorno's remark for the outrage and the fascination without the analysis. More importantly, what does it mean to "declare that after Auschwitz, there must be poetry" at this point in time? There is already a huge body of Holocaust-related poetry, fiction, films, tv shows, paintings, drawings, etc. Just because we cite that "poetry after Auschwitz" phrase endlessly (it has itself become quite poetic) doesn't mean we ever observed Adorno's "dictum" (which he himself modified, etc.). I share an interest in bringing analysis to our reception of depictions of the Holocaust. An on-going question/challenge is how to respect and acknowledge the necessary roles of both analysis and affect. Gary Weissman weissman@csd.uwm.edu
|