This two-week workshop, co-organized and co-led by Erin McGlothlin last August, examined the impact of Holocaust narratives on literary representations of mass atrocity and genocide produced in its aftermath. Participants analyzed the phenomenon of witnessing, issues of memory and representation, and aesthetics of violence in diverse contexts in order to establish a comparative framework for literature that responds to genocide and state-sponsored violence. Participants focused on both new readings of literature about the Holocaust and its aftermath, and the relation of the Holocaust to other significant events, including Apartheid in South Africa, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, dictatorship in Argentina, and post-Holocaust readings of the systemic violence of American plantation slavery
