131-450 Remembering the Holocaust

Admission to the postgraduate diploma or fourth year honours in history.

This subject will examine the variety of ways in which the Holocaust has come to be remembered in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It will take a comparative approach to the substantive and theoretical questions which remembering the Holocaust raises, considering developments in Israel and the wider Diaspora. It will address these questions from different theoretical perspectives, including feminism, post-structuralism and psychoanalysis. Questions and topics to be addressed include how the Holocaust came to function as a, if not the, definitive experience for modern Jewry; the different forms of memorialisation that have developed - museums, monuments, education courses, family tree projects, etc. - and the issues and controversies surrounding these; 'death camp tourism' and the revisits by Holocaust survivors and/or their descendants to places from which they were exiled; international and local movements to record survivor-witness testimonies, and the questions historians have raised about the historical value of such testimonies; the prolific growth of memoirs, autobiographies and other forms of writing by both survivors and their children; unconscious forms of remembering as evidenced in inter-generational transmission of trauma; and the relationship that remembering the Holocaust has to Jewish identity and to Jewish political existence.

• show an advanced understanding of the changing knowledge base in the specialist area;

• be able to evaluate and synthesise the research and professional literature in the discipline;

• have an appreciation of the design, conduct and reporting of original research.

An essay of 4000 words 80% (due at the end of semester) and 1000 word paper on one of the seminar topics 20% (due one week after the oral presentation)