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Bring Up the Bodies: The Classical Concept of Poetic Vividness and Its Reevaluation in Holocaust Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Alan Itkin
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Abstract

The scenario of someone gazing at corpses plays an important role in the work of three authors representing three generations of Holocaust literature: Peter Weiss, W. G. Sebald, and Jonathan Littell. Plato and Aristotle used this scenario to address a key question raised by the concept of poetic vividness, which they defined as putting a described scene before the reader's eyes: If literature shows us gruesome sights that we should not desire to see or enjoy seeing, does this make literature a form of voyeurism? Weiss, Sebald, and Littell evoke corpse gazing in the context of the Holocaust to answer this question and to articulate unique poetic philosophies that respond to the challenge to literature's validity constituted by the Holocaust. The diferent ways in which they use corpse gazing reveal how Holocaust literature has changed and continues to change as the era of survivor testimony wanes.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 107 - 123
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

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