Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0280 - Responses to the Holocaust

More than 70 years after the end of World War II, the mass atrocity of the Holocaust continues to provoke a tremendous amount of responses. Scholarship, literature, film, memorials, and museum exhibitions continue to proliferate, and there are now well over 50,000 video interviews with survivors. In this course we will explore the difficulties of grappling with the Holocaust, and of representing mass violence. How do different types of materials--historical studies, wartime diaries, documentary and feature films, graphic novels and fictional accounts, interviews with survivors and writings by perpetrators, memorials at sites of Holocaust violence and far removed from Europe--provide us with windows into understanding what happened then? What kinds of representations can still make us feel or think something new? Literature will be a central focus, but readings will include history and philosophy, and we'll look at films, art, and memorials. We'll explore material from the 1940s to the present day, and from a broad range of countries.

Independent Work Multiple Cultural Perspectives Writing and Research In this course, students will spend 6-10 hours weekly on work and preparation outside of class time.