Visual Culture and the Holocaust (Rutgers Depth of Field Series) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813528933 ISBN 13: 9780813528939

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2001

Synopsis

How does one represent the Holocaust? What does it mean to visualize it? Despite Theodor Adorno's famous injunction that there can be no poetry after the Holocaust, the past half century has produced repeated attempts to impart that which has been considered beyond the limits of representation. From Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary project Shoah, to Art Spiegelman's Maus, the visual domain has emerged as a fruitful venue for representing those horrible times.

Visual Culture and the Holocaust takes that domain as its focus. It considers the increasing number of works that claim to give us access to the Holocaust, asking for whom these images are intended and how effective they are at promoting remembrance and understanding. Barbie Zelizer has gathered essays from a group of internationally renowned scholars representing a broad range of disciplines to consider both the traditional and the unconventional ways in which the Holocaust has been visually represented. In addressing film, painting, photography, museum exhibits, television, the Internet, and the body itself as venues for these representations, the essays explore the abilities of these different genres to testify to the tragedy, particularly in relation to the horrific historical fact they seek to translate.

Visual Culture and the Holocaust substantially enhances what we know of the visual representation of the Holocaust. An introduction by the editor provides an important historical and theoretical overview of these efforts as well as a context in which these accomplishments may be understood.

About this title

About the Author

Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Term Chair and an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye and other books on the media.

Review

These essays examine the visual representation of the Holocaust. Although there are many thinkers who posit that an event of the Holocaust's magnitude cannot be understood by verbal or visual portrayals there is, nonetheless, a huge body of work in many media. . . . Each essay, whether it deals with film, photography, museums, art, or television, provides many points for discussion or further scholarship. Photographs, notes, and bibliographies enhance the importance of this collection. Recommended for college and university libraries. (MultiCultural Review)

In this book a group of scholars representing a broad range of disciplines consider the increasing number of works that claim to give us access to the Holocaust and asks for whom these images are intended and how effective they are at promoting remembrance and understanding. (Shofar)

Handsomely produced with ample and stunning illustrations. . . . Read collectively, the essays powerfully challenge reigning assumptions regarding the extent to which visual culture is successful in representing or obliged to represent, rather than incompletely and metaphorically to evoke or translate, the Nazi genocide. (Religious Studies Review)

Edition details

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813528933
• ISBN 13: 9780813528939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 364
• Editor: Zelizer Barbie