Sounds of Defiance

Sounds of Defiance

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SKU: 9780803239623
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Description

Language has frequently been at the center of discussions about Holocaust writing. Yet English, a primary language of neither the persecutors nor the victims, has generally been viewed as marginal to the events of the Holocaust. Alan Rosen argues that this marginal status profoundly affects writing on the Holocaust in English and fundamentally shapes our understanding of the events. Sounds of Defiance chronicles the evolving status of English in writing about the Holocaust, from the period of the Second World War to the 1990s.
 
Each chapter highlights a representative work from a different genre—psychology, sociology, memoir, tales, fiction, and film—and examines the special position of English with regard to the Holocaust, supported by references to the role of other languages, including Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. This original approach provides a new perspective on such standard works as Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Shawl, and Maus, while drawing attention to others largely unknown. Rosen also links this analysis of English writing to developments in the postwar period: the escalating production of writing on the Holocaust in English; the increasing prestige of English as a global language; and paradoxically, within the contexts of neocolonial and multilingual studies, the increasingly uncertain position of English.
Alan Rosen is a 2004–2005 fellow at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2005 Sosland Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has published books and articles on Holocaust writing and is currently working on a book dealing with David Boder and Holocaust testimony.
“Rosen has written a timely, valuable, and illuminating book. . . . Sounds of Defiance is heartfelt and intelligent, and it points the way for future studies of the role of English in conveying the Jewish catastrophe of the twentieth century.”—Biography
“Alan Rosen . . . engages the ideas of such thinkers as Dorothy Bilik, Shoshana Felman, Sander Gilman, Alan Mintz, and Hana Wirth-Nesher. Like many of these critics, he approaches the subject of Holocaust history, fiction, and film with an appreciation of spoken and written Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and German as well as English languages and traditions.”—Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
“Sounds of Defiance is an absorbing examination of how English, a marginal language in the wartime history of European Jewry, has figured in Holocaust narratives that originate from multilingual contexts. . . . Following the useful introduction, eleven chapters, each one a pleasure to read for its clarity and insightfulness, consider not only whether but also how English functions as a language of the Holocaust. . . . Rosen’s work, an important contribution to Holocaust studies, can inspire and provoke all scholars interested in ‘global English’ and in multilingualism and speech in literary studies.” —American Literature
“Sounds of Defiance is a comprehensive work that establishes links between otherwise distinct forms of expression. Most impressive is the reliable connective tissue that Rosen creates to explore the roles of language through six decades of Holocaust self-representation. In the end, Rosen delivers a valuable and broad-ranging resource to students of linguistics, film, poetics, and the psychology of traumatic memory.”—Jonathan M. Alexander, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Additional information

Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in