Table of Contents

Reading and the Holocaust
1: 'Not read and consumed in the same way as other books': Identification and the Genre of Testimony
2: Traces of Experience: The Texts of Testimony
3: 'Faithful and doubtful, near and far': Memory, Postmemory, and Identity
4: Holocaust Reading: Memory and Identification in Holocaust Fiction 1990-2003
Holocaust Metahistories
5: Against Historicism: History, Memory, and Truth
6: 'Are Footnotes Less Barbaric?': History, Memory, and the Truth of the Holocaust in the Work of Saul Friedländer
7: ' What Constitutes a Historical Explanation?': Metahistory and the Limits of Historical Explanation in the Goldhagen/Browning Controversy
8: The Metahistory of Denial: The Irving/Lipstadt Libel Case and Holocaust Denial
The Trace of the Holocaust
9: Inexhaustible Meaning, Inextinguishable Voices: Levinas and the Holocaust
10: Cinders of Philosophy, Philosophy of Cinders: Derrida and the Trace of the Holocaust
11: The Limits of Understanding: Perpetrator Philosophy and Philosophical Histories
12: The Postmodern, the Holocaust, and the Limits of the Human

Reviews

The breadth of topics covered, coupled with the author's erudition, makes The Holocaust and the Postmodern an invaluable resource for any course on the Holocaust. Nicholas Chare, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Vol. 14 The book is a very wide-ranging examination of the place of the Holocaust in contmeporary cultural discourse. Sue Vice, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History ... [this] book offers a fascinating typology of the genre of Holocaust testimony... Eaglestone offers a new and literary view of testimony which he links with postmodernism through their shared concern with identity and self-construction. Sue Vice, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History Eaglestone's book is surely the definitive work on this subject and it will remain so for a long time. The breadth and scope of his knowledge of literature on the Holocaust and of postmodern fiction and criticism, not to mention history and historiography, is truly staggering... Scholars of the postmodern, Holocaust literature, and history will find this a gold mine. Essential. Choice There can be little doubt that Eaglestone is a fine literary critic, astutely addressing questions that other scholars, more constrained by disciplinary boundaries, have not succeeded in answering. Efraim Sicher, European Legacy a superb discussion of the metahistorical polarity between the work of Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning... demonstrates the strengths of postmodernism and establishes Robert Eaglestone as one of its most accomplished practitioners. His book deserves to be read by sceptics and partisans of postmodernism alike. David Cesarani, TLS Eaglestone offers a remarkable example of lucid and clear prose...few could fail to benefit from a careful reading of his careful and thorough analysis. Holocaust and Genocide Studies This is a dazzling book that not only analyzes the relationship of postmodern to the Holocaust but discloses the ways that the Holocaust is bound to Western identity. Comparative Literature