I'm beginning to put together my fall '09 course, Representations of the Holocaust. I'm not a big fan of Wiesel's Night (not for lack of trying to admire it) but I still insist that the students read the original non-Oprah edition. Don't know if that less puffed-up version is available in sufficient quantities. Night, to me, is on one end of a spectrum of representations; Lanzmann's Shoah is on the other. My students and will watch all 9.5 hours of Shoah in one sitting on a Sunday. They complain bitterly and this itself becomes a major topic for discussion. If you look at the reading schedule, you can see that I'm convinced that Primo Levi is the one--the writer through which I feel the problems of representing this genocide can be most compellingly addressed. We also view a sampling of survivor testimonies from the great Yale video archive. Here are the links I provide the students.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
much more than night
I'm beginning to put together my fall '09 course, Representations of the Holocaust. I'm not a big fan of Wiesel's Night (not for lack of trying to admire it) but I still insist that the students read the original non-Oprah edition. Don't know if that less puffed-up version is available in sufficient quantities. Night, to me, is on one end of a spectrum of representations; Lanzmann's Shoah is on the other. My students and will watch all 9.5 hours of Shoah in one sitting on a Sunday. They complain bitterly and this itself becomes a major topic for discussion. If you look at the reading schedule, you can see that I'm convinced that Primo Levi is the one--the writer through which I feel the problems of representing this genocide can be most compellingly addressed. We also view a sampling of survivor testimonies from the great Yale video archive. Here are the links I provide the students.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
