Poetry after Auschwitz
Subtitle: remembering what one never knew
By: Susan Gubar.
Series: Jewish literature and culture
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Bloomington
Language: eng
Number of pages: 313
Subjects: American poetry -- Jewish authors -- History and criticism; English poetry -- Jewish authors -- History and criticism; American poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism; English poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Judaism and literature -- English-speaking countries; War and literature -- English-speaking countries; World War, 1939-1945 -- Literature and the war; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) in literature; Jews -- United States -- Intellectual life; Jews -- Great Britain -- Intellectual life; Jewish poetry -- History and criticism; Judaism in literature; Jews in literature
Description: "In this study Susan Gubar demonstrates that Theodor Adorno's famous injunction against writing poetry after Auschwitz paradoxically inspired an ongoing literary tradition. From the 1960s to the present, as the Shoah receded into a more remote European past, North American and British writers struggled to keep memory of it alive.".

"Many contemporary writers - among them Anthony Hecht, Gerald Stern, Sylvia Plath, William Heyen, Michael Hamburger, Irena Klepfisz, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Jacqueline Osherow, and Anne Michaels - have grappled with personal and political, ethical and aesthetic consequences of the disaster. Through confessional verse and reinventions of the elegy, as well as documentary poems about photographs and trials, poets serve as proxy-witnesses of events that they did not experience firsthand.

By speaking about or even as the dead, these men and women of letters elucidate what it means to cite, reconfigure, consume, or envy the traumatic memories of an earlier generation."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 281-299) and index.