ROMS 6370 - The Holocaust and History Writing

(crosslisted) GERST 6375

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with GERST 4375/ROMS 4370.

E. Traverso.

In the last decades, “Holocaust Studies” witnessed an extraordinary expansion, covering different fields of scholarship, from history to literature, from philosophy to aesthetics. This seminar will retrace the major steps of Holocaust history writing. It will analyze the classical debates between “intentionalism” and “functionalism,” the discrepancies between the analytical approaches focused on the perpetrators and those focused on the victims, the inscription of the Holocaust into the broader context of war violence, and its comparison with the genocidal violence of colonialism. Finally, it will investigate some methodological problems concerning the place of testimony in history writing and the permanent connections, both fruitful and problematic, between history and memory. This means taking into account the entanglement of the most productive areas of Holocaust scholarship (Germany, France and the United States) as well as the relationship between the historiography of the Holocaust and other disciplines (memory studies, postcolonial studies, etc.).