PN56.H55E24

I: Reading and the holocaust -- 'Not read and consumed in the same way as other books': identification and the genre of testimony -- Traces of experience: the texts of testimony -- 'Faithful and doubtful, near and far': memory, postmemory, and identity -- Holocaust reading: memory and identification in Holocaust fiction, 1990-2003 -- II: Holocaust metahistories -- Against historicism: history, memory, and truth -- 'Are footnotes less barbaric?': history, memory, and the truth of the Holocaust in the work of Saul Friedlan?der -- 'What constitutes a historical explanation": metahistory and the limits of historical explanation in the Goldhagen/Browning controversy -- The metahistory of denial: the Irving/Lipstady libel case and Holocaust denial -- Inexhaustible meaning, inextinguishable voices: Levinas and the Holocaust -- Cinders of philosophy, philosophy of cinders: Derrida and the trace of the Holocaust -- The limits of understanding: perpetrator philosophy and philosophical histories -- The postmodern, the Holocaust, and the limits of the human

Robert Eaglestone argues that postmodernism is a response to the Holocaust. He offers a range of new perspectives, including new ways of looking at testimony and at and recent Holocaust fiction; explores controversies in Holocaust history; looks at the importance of the Holocaust for recent philosophy; and asks what the Holocaust means for reason, ethics, and for being human.