Awards
- Winner of Honorable Mention, 2011 Kulczycki Book Prize.
Overview
In stark contrast to the widespread preoccupation with the wartime looting of priceless works of art, Bozena Shallcross focuses on the meaning of ordinary objects-pots, eyeglasses, shoes, clothing, kitchen utensils-tangible vestiges of a once-lived reality, which she reads here as cultural texts. Shallcross delineates the ways in which Holocaust objects are represented in Polish and Polish-Jewish texts written during or shortly after World War II. These representational strategies are distilled from the writings of Zuzanna Ginczanka, Wladyslaw Szlengel, Zofia Nalkowska, Czeslaw Milosz, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Tadeusz Borowski. Combining close readings of selected texts with critical interrogations of a wide range of philosophical and theoretical approaches to the nature of matter, Shallcross's study broadens the current discourse on the Holocaust by embracing humble and overlooked material objects as they were perceived by writers of that time.
Full Product Details
Author: Bożena Shallcross
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.40cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.431kg
ISBN: 9780253355645
ISBN 10: 0253355648
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 21 February 2011
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Brilliant and ambitious ... approaches [the] topic from a fresh and intellectually challenging perspective... Shallcross's book is surely the most sophisticated analysis of Polish Holocaust literature ever written. Madeline G. Levine, University of North Carolina
"""Brilliant and ambitious ... approaches [the] topic from a fresh and intellectually challenging perspective... Shallcross's book is surely the most sophisticated analysis of Polish Holocaust literature ever written."" Madeline G. Levine, University of North Carolina ""Shallcross has written an erudite book that provides novel insights into a broad range of themes, including memory, representation, ethics, the human senses, and Polish Jewish relations. From my perspective as a cultural historian of memory and of the Holocaust, I see her book making two key interdisciplinary contributions. First, Shallcross labors, in many ways, as a cultural historian as much as she does as a literary scholar. Her analysis of Polish and Polish Jewish responses to the Holocaust as it was taking place (or just shortly after it ended) vividly reconstructs the Nazi destruction of Polish Jewry and the distinct literary encounters with human violence that the Holocaust engendered. Her book marks a significant addition to the historiography of the Holocaust. Second, Shallcross's work enriches our understanding of early Polish and Polish Jewish responses to the Holocaust. Analyzing Milosz's poem ""A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,"" she pauses to reflect on the significance of its creation: ""To my knowledge, no non-Jewish author who lived under the terror of the Nazi rule would have signed an audacious poetic document of this caliber."" - Michael Meng, H-Judaic, August 2012"
Author Information
Bożena Shallcross is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She is author of Through the Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky and editor (with David L. Ransel) of Polish Encounters/Russian Identity (IUP, 2005).
