Perpetrator Fiction and the Future of the Holocaust.
Navn på bevillingshaver
Moritz Schramm
Institution
University of Southern Denmark
Beløb
DKK 789,000
År
2021
Bevillingstype
Monograph Fellowships
Hvad?
The monograph adresses a new and growing tendency in international literature: the emergence of a new kind of 'perpetrator fiction', narrating the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust through the perspective of the Nazi-perpetrator. Instead of reading the new 'perpetrator'-novels as pure sensational provocations, or as attempts to 'humanize' the perpetrators, as some scholars suggest, the monograph explores the ethical implications of those novels, focusing on what I call the 'future of the Holocaust': the attempt to draw attention to the historical past's ethical and moral consequences for present and future generations. There will be particular focus on the aesthetic structure of the novels, giving agency and moral responsibility to the reader herself.
Hvorfor?
The project helps to depict and to explore a novel tendency in memory culture, where the earlier focus on the representation of the past is now increasingly replaced by questions of the present reader's agency and moral responsibility. The project widens the corpus of 'perpetrator'-literature, including novels from countries such as Denmark, Australia, France, Finland, Israel, and tries to map common strategies and approaches in the novels, on a formal and thematic level. The monograph thus adds new knowledge on what has been called the 'universalization of the Holocaust': the fact that the new memory culture is more and more focussing on the ethical and moral implications of the past, affecting everybody regardless his or her's personal background or heritage.
Hvordan?
It is the aim of the project to finish the first version of the monograph between september '22 and august '23.