The Translation From Memory to Postmemory: The Mother-Daughter Dialogue in Post-Holocaust Literature

"All of these texts evoke layers of translation in the communicative process between the generations. The daughters help their mothers unlock and vocalize the past, and in a second step often attempt to adopt and integrate their mother's stories into their own cultural-political framework of references and speech. Lena Einhorn's and Lydie Salvayre's texts, written from the victims' perspective, demonstrate the demands of ""listening to trauma"" and the daughters' need to position themselves as mediators and literally translators between their mother's story and the outside world. The moment of translation in Johnson's and Wolf's texts, presented from the perspective of German perpetration, is simultaneously a process of close association with and separation from the parents' shameful past. An analysis of the dialogic encounter between mothers and daughters in all of the texts shows that postmemory emerges as a translation of the mother's original memory."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Comparative Literature

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Wandelt, Sonja Julia

Contributors dc:contributor

• Blake, Nancy

• Literature, Romance

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3347554

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/87299