| Summary: | "Tracing the Holocaust: Experiments in Late Twentieth-Century Art and Literature" explores the vexed relationship between experimental aesthetics and historical trauma. As an interdisciplinary project, it addresses a number of visual and literary forms including conceptual art, photography, architecture, fiction and memoir. Although the historical event is a central point of reference, the dissertation does not focus on strictly realist and/or eyewitness accounts of the genocide but considers work that is cryptic, fragmented, and meta-historical. A central argument of the project is that experimental representations succeed because they force us to move beyond the familiar outlines of conventional and often formulaic structures. The uncertainty as well as the engagement required of us in this process of moving towards unfamiliar and uncomfortable terrain is the work's real value. The methodology guiding this project is an uneasy mix of materialism, post-structuralism and trauma theory. What this makes possible is an engagement with history and aesthetic experimentation as mutually constitutive rather than discreet fields of inquiry and representation. Chapter 1 reevaluates the work of French artist Christian Boltanski in light of recent theoretical writing on humour and the Holocaust; it also addresses the relationship between childhood, historical trauma and representation. Chapter 2 traces the complex ways in which Canadian novelist Sharon Riis uses the Holocaust as a paradigmatic traumatic event through which to read the genocide of Canada's First Nations. Chapter 3 reads the memoirs of Georges Perec, Marguerite Duras and Sarah Kofman as examples of traumatic realism, arguing that, through the topographical imposition of Holocaust onto the city of Paris, these memoirs represent the historical event as a legacy that is both imperative and impossible to read. The issues surrounding identity and ethics are two of the most insistent concerns of the texts examined here. Therefore, the questions central to the project include: What is the relationship between heroism and humour in the context of historical trauma? What are the markings of a post-Holocaust sensibility? a post-Holocaust subjectivity? And finally, what are the ethical implications of imaginative representations that forego epistemological and ontological certainty in favour of an affective unknowing? Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta (Canada), 2006. School code: 0351.
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