Preface:
This course is about how people tell stories about trauma and traumatic experience – and how survivors of genocide deal with the responsibility they feel to speak for those who died. Our approach to these large issues is through the Holocaust, and we will discuss the enormous difficulties faced by those who felt the urgent need to describe their own or others’ experiences during the genocide of the European Jews, 1933-1945. We will explore the complex options they have faced as narrators, witnesses, allegorists, memoirists, scholars, teachers, writers and image-makers. Some linguistically (or visually) face the difficulty head on; most evade, avoid, repress, stutter or go silent, and agonize. Part of the purpose of the course is for us to learn how to sympathize with the struggle of those in the latter group. This is not a history course, although the vicissitudes of historiography will be a frequent topic of conversation, enriching the Language Arts content.
We will read books by survivors, watch video-recorded testimony of survivors telling their compelling stories, and watch films seeking to represent the genocide. Some of the books we will read can be used by teachers in middle- and high-school classes, and some of the materials have been carefully and selectively adapted for elementary grades. How a curriculum unit can be developed around issues of genocide, racial hatred, survivor guilt, guilty bystanding, and the individual human response to trauma will be a focus of the course as well.