John C. Hodges Library, Lindsay Young Auditorium (rm. 101)
03:30 PM - 05:00 PM on Mon, 18 Mar 2024
About the Talk:
Visiting scholar Erin McGlothlin (Washington University in St. Louis) will give a public talk titled "Imagining Operation Reinhard in Contemporary Holocaust Fiction" as part of the UT Humanities Center’s 2023-2024 Distinguished Lecture Series.
This presentation focuses on the mechanisms by which the canon of Holocaust literature has come to posit the Auschwitz killing center and labor camp as the dominant site of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. While the specific horror of the Auschwitz experience is without question of central importance to the history and representation of the genocide, the cultural proclivity to reduce the complexity of the Holocaust to Auschwitz has left little space for the literary imagination of other important sites and experiences of the Holocaust, particularly the Operation Reinhard killing centers Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełźec, at which collectively around 1.7 million mostly Polish Jews were murdered. This presentation will examine how the genocide manifested differently at those sites and consider the ways in which the historical experience of the Operation Reinhard killing centers brings distinct challenges to the project of literary representation.
The lecture is free and open to the public and is held in Hodges Library’s auditorium on the UT Knoxville campus. Public parking is available in the Volunteer Hall parking garage for our off-campus visitors. Everyone is welcome!
About the Speaker:
Erin McGlothlin is a professor of German and Jewish Studies and vice dean of Undergraduate Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis. She has published widely on fictional and non-fictional representations of the Holocaust, focusing on such topics as the narrative structure of Holocaust literature and film, perpetrator representation and perpetrator trauma, ethical questions related to Holocaust representation, and generational discourse. She is the author of Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (2006) and The Mind of the Holocaust Perpetrator in Fiction and Nonfiction (2021) and co-editor of four volumes: After the Digital Divide?: German Aesthetic Theory in the Age of New Digital Media (2009, with Lutz Koepnick), Persistent Legacy: The Holocaust and German Studies (2016, with Jennifer Kapczynski), The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and its Outtakes (2020, with Brad Prager and Markus Zisselsberger), and Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust 15: The Holocaust: Global Perspectives and National Narratives (2023, with Avinoam Patt). Together with Stuart Taberner, she is also co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Holocaust Literature, which aims to set the path of the scholarly discourse on the literature of the Holocaust for the next twenty-five years.
About the Series:
The UT Humanities Center's Distinguished Lecture Series brings acclaimed humanities scholars and renowned artists to the Knoxville campus for research-based conversations with UT faculty and graduate students and to give a public talk on a topic of the speaker's choosing. Speakers are nominated and hosted by faculty from our nine affiliated arts and humanities departments. Because only speakers with exceptional records of publication and research activity are eligible to receive a nomination as a visiting scholar, the program brings to campus some of the most cutting-edge and prolific intellectuals in the humanities today. Details on this season's program are available on our website.
Where:
Lindsay Young Auditorium (rm. 101)
John C. Hodges Library (1015 Volunteer Blvd., Knoxville TN)
OR
Via livestream at tiny.utk.edu/DLS-McGlothlin