- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Introduction: A Voice Still Heard
- This Age of Conformity {1954}
- Review of The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett {1954}
- The Stories of Bernard Malamud {1958}
- Doris Lessing: No Compromise, No Happiness {1963}
- Life Never Let Up: Review of Call It Sleep {1964}
- New Styles in “Leftism” {1965}
- George Orwell: “As the Bones Know” {1968}
- The New York Intellectuals {1969}
- A Grave and Solitary Voice: An Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson {1970}
- What's the Trouble? Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both {1971}
- The City in Literature {1971}
- Tribune of Socialism: Norman Thomas {1976}
- Strangers {1977}
- Introduction: Twenty-five Years of Dissent {1979}
- Introduction: The Best of Sholom Aleichem, with Ruth Wisse {1979}
- Mission from Japan: Review of The Samurai {1982}
- Absalom in Israel: Review of Past Continuous {1985}
- Why Has Socialism Failed in America? {1985}
- Writing and the Holocaust {1986}
- Reaganism: The Spirit of the Times {1986}
- Two Cheers for Utopia {1993}
- The Road Leads Far Away: Review of A Surplus of Memory {1993}
- Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf {1994}
- Dickens: Three Notes {1994}
- Tolstoy: Did Anna Have to Die?{1994}
- Reflection on the Death of My Father {1982}
- From the Thirties to the Rise of Neoconservatism: Interview with Stephen Lewis {1983}
- Sources
Writing and the Holocaust {1986}
Writing and the Holocaust {1986}
- Chapter:
- (p.277) Writing and the Holocaust {1986}
- Source:
- A Voice Still Heard
- Author(s):
Irving Howe
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1986 essay “Writing and the Holocaust,” in which he argues that it is a grave error to “elevate” the Holocaust into an occurrence outside of history. Howe begins by emphasizing how Holocaust “resists the usual capacities of the mind,” and that dealing with this subject raises a number of difficult problems. He then describes the endless quantity of sadism in the concentration camps set up by the Nazis, such as those at Dachau and Buchenwald. He also discusses Theodor Adorno's statement that, “After Auschwitz [...]to write a poem is barbaric.” Howe believes that Adorno was stating the sheer difficulty of writing after the Holocaust, and has opened up the entire question of the validity of an “aesthetic” response to Holocaust literature.
Keywords: history, Irving Howe, Holocaust, concentration camps, Nazis, Theodor Adorno, Holocaust literature
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Foreword
- Introduction: A Voice Still Heard
- This Age of Conformity {1954}
- Review of The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett {1954}
- The Stories of Bernard Malamud {1958}
- Doris Lessing: No Compromise, No Happiness {1963}
- Life Never Let Up: Review of Call It Sleep {1964}
- New Styles in “Leftism” {1965}
- George Orwell: “As the Bones Know” {1968}
- The New York Intellectuals {1969}
- A Grave and Solitary Voice: An Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson {1970}
- What's the Trouble? Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both {1971}
- The City in Literature {1971}
- Tribune of Socialism: Norman Thomas {1976}
- Strangers {1977}
- Introduction: Twenty-five Years of Dissent {1979}
- Introduction: The Best of Sholom Aleichem, with Ruth Wisse {1979}
- Mission from Japan: Review of The Samurai {1982}
- Absalom in Israel: Review of Past Continuous {1985}
- Why Has Socialism Failed in America? {1985}
- Writing and the Holocaust {1986}
- Reaganism: The Spirit of the Times {1986}
- Two Cheers for Utopia {1993}
- The Road Leads Far Away: Review of A Surplus of Memory {1993}
- Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf {1994}
- Dickens: Three Notes {1994}
- Tolstoy: Did Anna Have to Die?{1994}
- Reflection on the Death of My Father {1982}
- From the Thirties to the Rise of Neoconservatism: Interview with Stephen Lewis {1983}
- Sources
