When Facts Become Figures: Figurative Dynamics in Youth Holocaust Literature

This thesis traces the fluctuations of figurative language and imagery in youth literature, illustrating how the Holocaust has been and continues to be represented and manipulated. Youth Holocaust literature, often a young person’s first introduction to the events of the Nazi genocide, exposes the ways we imagine, narrate, communicate, and alter the facts of war and trauma. Examining what I term figurative dynamics, the process and movement of literary techniques that position themselves in contrast to strictly literal tellings and retellings of the Holocaust, this thesis reveals the developments, dialectics, and problematics of youth Holocaust literature as time propels authors farther away from the event itself. My first chapter demonstrates the narrative flexibility of works written during the Second World War by exploring figurative experimentation in Anne Frank’s diary, Yankev Glatshteyn’s Emil and Karl, and the children’s opera and subsequent picture book, Brundibár. Chapter 2 places Elie Wiesel’s Night in conversation with other postwar memoirs and early scholarship on Holocaust literature to examine how narrative flexibility transformed into rigidity in texts that purport to tell the true story of the survivor-as-author’s experiences during the Holocaust. Works from the 1980s and 1990s by Art Spiegelman and Jane Yolen form the basis of my third chapter, departing from strict postwar traditions of factual life-writing for young people and literalizing the figurative to achieve a new kind of authenticity that was separate from and in many ways moved beyond the representational scope of earlier writers. Finally, through works by J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Ransom Riggs, my fourth chapter shows that in our contemporary moment, when the impulse toward generalizations, soundbites, and monolithic narratives is pervasive, the Holocaust can become not only an event to be explored by carefully using the tools of metaphor and fantasy, but a metonymic tool in itself employed in service of particular political, social, narratological, moral, emotional, and pedagogical agendas. Proceeding chronologically, this thesis thus demonstrates how multiple and morphing figurative dynamics and imaginative strategies in the ever-changing genre of youth Holocaust literature raise and complicate questions of representation in and beyond the field of genocide studies.

Department dc:contributor.department

English

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Krongold, Joanna

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Most, Andrea

• figurative dynamics
• Holocaust literature
• representations of trauma
• youth literature

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/121488

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/121488