From the Absent God to the Absent Text Agnon and the Writing of Catastrophe

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2025
Host editors
  • Ari Ackerman
  • Robin B. ten Hoopen
  • Lieve M. Teugels
  • Archibald L.H.M. van Wieringen
Book title Memory
Book subtitle Papers Read at the Jewish and Christian Perspectives Conference, Utrecht 2022
ISBN
  • 9789004737525
ISBN (electronic)
  • 9789004737532
Series Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series
Chapter 12
Pages (from-to) 177-192
Number of pages 16
Publisher Leiden: Brill
Organisations
  • Faculty of Humanities (FGw) - Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR) - Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES)
Abstract The artistic representation of human historical catastrophes intimately connects the aesthetical with the ethical. How can one remember horrors? How can one aestheticise human calamities? Shmuel Yosef Agnon could not escape that ethico-aesthetic dilemma. This is apparently one of the main reasons he rarely directly addressed the Holocaust in his literature. In his attempts to reconcile ethics and poetics Agnon uses, consciously or not, philosophical and theological ideas. The following contribution will offer a detailed examination of some of his poetical attempts at writing about catastrophe.
Document type Conference contribution
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004737532_013
Downloads
9789004737532-BP000018 (Final published version)
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