Postmemory and Postmodern: Traumatic History and the Poetics of Absence in Recent Jewish American Novels Ghent University
This project investigates the ways in which postmodern historiographic metafiction, by its embrace of a poetics of absence, is employed for postmemorial purposes by Jewish American third generation authors after the Shoah, such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Michael Chabon. Their Holocaust novels paradoxically escape the lure of traditional historiographyU+2019s desire for emplotment, teleology, and closure of trauma.