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Kupferberg Holocaust Center-NEH Book: Approaches to Mass Atrocity Education in Community Colleges: Chapter 9

"Humanistic Pedagogy Across the Disciplines": An edited volume featuring insights from QCC faculty members who incorporated the Kupferberg Holocaust Center's resources into their classrooms

Chapter 9: Teaching the Holocaust: Making Literary Theory Memorable

About the Chapter:

This chapter addresses the integration of a Holocaust unit into an “Introduction to Literary Theory” course. While the first half of the course was more traditional, the second part covered Holocaust narratives from the perspective of cultural memory theory, which argues that memories of public events are mediated by language and society. Drawing on student writings and personal reflections, this chapter shows how discussing the Holocaust helped students make the critical connections between narrative and theory. The chapter concludes by arguing for learning activities that promote a critical vocabulary that asks students to continuously question how mass atrocities like the Holocaust are memorialized, and thereby forces them to inhabit the uncomfortable space between private memory and public remembrance.

About the Author:

Johannes Burgers, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at James Madison University in Virginia. His chapter reflects work done while an Assistant Professor at Queensborough Community College, CUNY. His research focuses on intersections of race science, sexuality, and modernity in a transnational context, specifically the influence of anti-Semitism on literature. He has published on this topic in The Journal of the History of Ideas, Jewish Studies Quarterly, and edited collections. His book manuscript investigates the relationship between anti-Semitism and modernism in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and Robert Musil.