Sandor Goodhart's guest appearances

Sandor Goodhart

Center for Critical Inquiry and Cultural Studies

Sarah Pessin

Alexander Etkind

Helen Epstein

Lawrence L. Langer

Simon J. Ortiz

Rainer U. W. Schulze

Karl Figlio

Gabriele M. Schwab

Leslie Marmon Silko

Yael Danieli

Patricia Huntington

Gabrielle Schwab

Marianne Hirsh

Leo Spitzer

Berel Lang

OwlTail

The latter half of the twentieth century highlighted the failure of redemptive understandings of the Shoah. Dividing the history of Holocaust studies into separable periods, we may identify (1) a period of silence, in which the survivors endeavored to speak and few cared to listen (1945-1960); (2) a period in which redemptive narratives flourished, begun perhaps with the Eichmann trial, and represented in popular culture by an event like the TV production "Holocaust" (1960-1985); and (3) a period in which anti-redemptive narratives began to appear, marked for example by Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah, or the various stages of the so-called Historickerstreit, among other ways of engaging non-representational or anti-representational understandings--trauma studies, for example (1985-present). I wonder whether for the past ten years or so we have been broaching a fourth moment, one no longer focused exclusively upon either conscious or unconscious understandings but one that would include a new emphasis upon the structure of interpretation itself, and one in which the re-articulations of silences of the past, the activation of redemptive narratives, and the challenges to such interpretations (either in the form of anti-redemptive accounts or the invention of counter memory and counter redemptive accounts) would assume new significance in historiography, cultural analysis, literary analysis, and the modalities of memorialization. Sandor Goodhart is Director of Interdisciplinary Program in Classics, former Director of Jewish studies, and faculty in Philosophy and Literature Ph.D. Program at Purdue University. Goodhart received his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo and was one of the earliest graduate fellows of the School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine. With his English background, Goodhart specializes in dramatic literature, literary theory and criticism, and Jewish Studies. Good hart has published articles in Diacritics, Philosophy And Literature, and Modern Judaism, among many others. He is also a member of various editorial boards, including Contagion: Journal of Mimesis, Religion, and Culture and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Currently Goodhart is at work on two books: Moebian Nights: Literary Reading After Auschwitz and The Tears of Esau: Reading, Revelation, And The Prophetic.

The latter half of the twentieth century highlighted the failure of redemptive understandings of the Shoah. Dividing the history of Holocaust studies into separable periods, we may identify (1) a period of silence, in which the survivors endeavored to speak and few cared to listen (1945-1960); (2) a period in which redemptive narratives flourished, begun perhaps with the Eichmann trial, and represented in popular culture by an event like the TV production "Holocaust" (1960-1985); and (3) a period in which anti-redemptive narratives began to appear, marked for example by Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah, or the various stages of the so-called Historickerstreit, among other ways of engaging non-representational or anti-representational understandings--trauma studies, for example (1985-present). I wonder whether for the past ten years or so we have been broaching a fourth moment, one no longer focused exclusively upon either conscious or unconscious understandings but one that would include a new emphasis upon the structure of interpretation itself, and one in which the re-articulations of silences of the past, the activation of redemptive narratives, and the challenges to such interpretations (either in the form of anti-redemptive accounts or the invention of counter memory and counter redemptive accounts) would assume new significance in historiography, cultural analysis, literary analysis, and the modalities of memorialization. Sandor Goodhart is Director of Interdisciplinary Program in Classics, former Director of Jewish studies, and faculty in Philosophy and Literature Ph.D. Program at Purdue University. Goodhart received his Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo and was one of the earliest graduate fellows of the School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine. With his English background, Goodhart specializes in dramatic literature, literary theory and criticism, and Jewish Studies. Good hart has published articles in Diacritics, Philosophy And Literature, and Modern Judaism, among many others. He is also a member of various editorial boards, including Contagion: Journal of Mimesis, Religion, and Culture and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Currently Goodhart is at work on two books: Moebian Nights: Literary Reading After Auschwitz and The Tears of Esau: Reading, Revelation, And The Prophetic.

Sandor Goodhart, Counter Redemptive Writing and the Fourth Stage of Holocaust Historiography