Professor Miriam Fuchs
Eng 271(03) Life Writing
Witnessing the Holocaust in Film & Memoir
T,TH 10:30 – 11:45
Description and Goals
This writing intensive course introduces you to the genre of life writing and visual testimony of the Holocaust through film, documentary, memoir, poetry, and graphic fable. You’ll explore the difficult options authors face as witnesses, survivors, and children of survivors with very different points of view and knowledge. Holocaust testimony has been at the center of discussions on memory and trauma as well as the ethics of representing personal history through genres other than traditional biography and autobiography. You’ll learn how the genocides of World War II strongly influence our understanding of contemporary genocides. You’ll also come to recognize the high stakes involved in writing, reading, viewing, and critically thinking about Holocaust life writing, along with memoir and film. We will view only selected scenes of the films in class, so you must be thoroughly prepared to watch them on your own.
Required Films (Tentative)
Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1955)
Steven Spielberg’s Shindler’s List (1993)
Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002)
Possibly Michael Verhoeven’s The Nasty Girl (1990)
Required Literary Texts at Revolution Book Store. Have all books at the start of the course.
Primo Levi. Survival in Auschwitz.
Art Spiegelman. Maus I: My Father Bleeds History
Elie Weisel. Night
Doris Bergen. War & Genocide 2nd Edition: A Concise History of the Holocaust.
Short selections of diaries, testimonies and poems by Charlotte Delbo, Paul Celan, Tadeusz Borowski (on Laulima website)
Requirements and Grades
1. Essay #1 & revision (15%)
2. Essay #2 & revision (15%)
3. In-Class Midterm (no revision, 20%)
4. Essay #3 & optional revision (20%)
5. Final exam (20%)
6. Reading & viewing quiz grades; short oral presentation (10%)