Forgetful Memory and Images of the Holocaust

College English Mar 2004

Forgetful Memory and Images of the Holocaust

Michael Bernard-Donals

Abstract

N n September of 2001, I had just begun teaching an undergraduate course entitled Writing (and) the Holocaust. When my students and I arrived in class on the eleventh, we'd each heard that something was terribly wrong in New York and Washington. By the next class, we all knew, and had seen, the worst: images of the explosions near the top of the World Trade Center towers, images of firefighters and office workers covered in debris from their collapse, and the repeated images of tangled steel while construction workers, police, and firefighters searched for the dead. We didn't directly confront the event the first couple of weeks of the semester; we didn't have to. In trying to understand how to build a knowledge of the events of the Shoah, it was impossible to hold at bay the profoundly disturbing questions about the narratives we build to explain such events, whether of 9/11 or of the Shoah. Those narratives and their alternatives-the narra-

Journal: College English
Published: 2004-03-01
DOI: 10.2307/4140708
Open Access: Closed
Topics: multimodality