This course examines literary responses to the Holocaust (the Shoah, the Nazi persecution of European Jewry on the purported basis of undesireable racial difference that could only be addressed through genocide). Reading and writing, lecture and discussion, and some relevant special speakers or films.

The Holocaust has been described as beyond imagining, beyond comprehension, and beyond representation. Nonetheless, there have long been attempts to represent, document, appropriate, and deny the Holocaust; to memorialize, remember, bear witness; to understand perpetrator, victim, victim-survivor, and bystander psychology; and to ensure such an event and any such discrimination based on phenotype read as undesireable and inevitable personal or collective traits never happens again, its lessons elucidated. Writing intensive. English and/or Women’s Studies credit. May include such authors as Anne Frank, Ruth Kluger, Art Spiegelman, Philip Roth, Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel, Tadeuz Borowski, and poems, stories, and essays stories from Truth and Lamentation and/or Art from the Ashes. Email: diane.freedman@unh.edu

This course may be taken as an English capstone course and/or for Women’s Studies, Religious Studies, and/or American Studies credit. If you are taking the course for credit in one of these programs, please check in with an appropriate advisor.

In Fall 2020 this course satisfies a Post-1800 Literature requirement for English Department majors. 

Course offered online with optional on campus meeting times.  On campus meeting times arranged with faculty.