Explore the vast range of titles available.

On the Defensive considers how our ethical responses to the Nazi camps have unintentionally repressed and denied the experiences of their victims. Through detailed readings of survivor narratives, particularly the works of political deportees Jorge Semprun and Charlotte Delbo, Sharon Marquart examines how well-intentioned people – including victims, their family members, and readers of witness literature – respond to such testimony in ways that are understood as ethical by their communities but serve instead to ignore victims’ experiences. As Marquart shows, collective disasters such as the Holocaust expose the limitations of our ethical theories. To cope with this instability we withdraw and defend ourselves through inattentive and formulaic responses that turn a blind eye to the plight of victims. Challenging contemporary theorizations of community, ethics, testimony, and trauma, On the Defensive is a far-reaching reflection on the ways in which communal understandings of our duties and responsibilities to others can facilitate the denial of an atrocity’s horrors.

In his book on testimonial writing published just after his retirement, Untimely Interventions, he examines how some disaster witnesses seek to cause \"disturbance in well-established cultural regularities and routines\" in order to combat the complacency and \"culturally blinded awareness\" that allows people to deny the atrocities that are happening and have happened in the past-the \"shit\" that happens, one might say (xix-xx, xviii). The cultural function of the witnessing texts themselves is indexical, in that their characteristic form of \"aboutness\" is indicative, \"pointing\" to an X that the culture's conventional means of representation are powerless, or at least inadequate, to reference, precisely because it lies at a point of supposedly distant extremity with respect to what the culture regards as its normal, and thus central, concerns. Figurai discourse can play a similar role by giving us \"more to be read than language conventionally permits us to say,\" by uttering \"what is unstatable,\" and doing this by making an \"inability-to-state the actual object of [language's] utterance-what signals us to attend to\" a culture's points of distant extremity that the same culture seeks to deny (xxviii-xxix).

Jorge Semprun The opening scene of Jorge Semprun's 1994 witnessing narrative L 'écriture ou la vie describes in detail the first instance in which the text's main character, \"Jorge,\" is faced with telling people who did not experience Buchenwald about the horrors of camp life.1 It is the day after the camp's liberation by Allied Forces, and the twenty-one yearold Spaniard and member of the French Resistance encounters three terrified officers in British uniforms while he is standing guard outside one of the camp's former SS barracks. The text won both the 1963 Prix Formentor and the Grand Prize of the French Resistance, and was immediately banned in Francoist Spain.2 The publication of Le grand voyage marked a turning point in Semprun's life from Spanish political militant to one of France's most important Deportation writers.3 Ly écriture ou la vie tells the story of Semprun's comingto-writing, and describes how becoming a writer further signaled a change in the way he coped with his traumatic past. In U écriture ou la vìe, fiction may be, as Carroll argues, a way of overcoming the shortcomings of conventional historical representation, but it does so by restricting people's imaginations rather than stimulating them, and limiting memory rather than expanding it.