LEADER 03499ctm a2200373Ia 4500001    46648
005    20240621144915.0
008    000922s1999    xx            000 0 eng d
035    (OCoLC)ocm45059923
035    46648
049    LHMA
040    LHM |beng |erda |cLHM
090    PS169.H64 |bG36 1999b
100 1  Gangbar, Steven.
245 13 An imported past : |bwriting the Holocaust in America / |cby Steven Gangbar.
264  0  |c1999.
300    iii, 278 leaves ; |c28 cm
336    text |btxt |2rdacontent
337    unmediated |bn |2rdamedia
338    volume |bnc |2rdacarrier
502    Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 1999.
504    Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-278).
520     With its dual movement towards the past as a vessel of mythic origins and towards the future as unbridled opportunity and progress, America has within its actual history buried pasts that reverberate under the weight of the Holocaust. The challenge to represent this event in America is felt as an encumbrance on its ability to sustain an idealized master narrative. The intrusion of unwelcome and destabilizing pasts awakened by the Holocaust is further complicated by the fact that, having been structured according to Enlightenment precepts, America was led on the one hand to configure principles of morality and rights in form of a scripturalized ur-text, and on the other, to embrace concepts of cultural and geographic expansion, ethnic and class differentiation, imperialism and genocide. Confronted with the Holocaust, America's ambivalence is tested as an unsustainable veil of strategic amnesia and tactical concealment behind which the force of its own history insists itself As an event that has reshaped the nature of contemporary historiography by putting on trial the traditional Enlightenment pillars of positivism, objectivity and rationalism, and universal rights that have anchored the work of history in the past, the Holocaust represents a limit-case of history's ability to circumscribe the past. When we add to this the notion that National Socialism represented a radicalization of Enlightenment precepts, albeit infused with an impenetrable evil, American attempts to represent the Holocaust become sites of contestation between an idealized and an actual American past. The challenge to American Holocaust representation thus becomes one of forging a post-Enlightenment, post-metaphysical discourse for speaking the past. Through an analysis of representative texts taken from architecture and literature, I expose America's relation to the past of the Holocaust as one of as a contestation between an actual past and an ideal past, and then show that struggle culminating in the insertion of an ethical component that is anterior to metaphysics and to the realm of idealization in which the Enlightenment ethical tradition is grounded.
530    Electronic version(s)  |bavailable internally at USHMM.
590     Dissertations and Theses
591    Record updated by Marcive processing 21 June 2024
650  0 Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature.
650  0 American literature |y20th century |xHistory and criticism.
610 20 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
600 10 Spiegelman, Art. |tMaus.
956 41  |u http://dc.ushmm.org/library/bib46648/9918204.pdf  |z Hosted by USHMM.
994    E0 |bLHM
852 0   |bstacks |hPS169.H64 |iG36 1999b
852     |bebook