ARTH 463
The Holocaust Visualized
Last Offered Fall 2008
Division I
Cross-listed JWST 463
This course is not offered in the current catalog

This seminar will examine how memories of the Holocaust have been conveyed through visual means and consider what historical, cultural and political circumstances have caused various nations to remember the Holocaust differently. We will discuss the issues prompted by public memorials, exhibitions and, as one writer puts it, the “museumification” of concentration camps. How should we define the Holocaust? Whose memory should take precedence? What is lost or gained by the inclusion of texts with images? How might memory be misrepresented by the exhibition of visual materials such as video testimony, photographs and artifacts? In addition, we will study art about the Holocaust, including Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus, and non-fiction films, such as Night and Fog, Shoah and Schindler’s List, to ask whether constructed or simulated images can convey the experience of the Holocaust as well as documentary ones. Additionally, we need to consider ways in which the images of the Holocaust, by now too well-known, have been instrumentalized by groups wishing to minimize the Shoah (e.g., the recent Holocaust cartoon competition in Tehran, 2006.)