Postmodernizing the Holocaust

Curiosity about the fate of postmodernism combined with interest in the fate of novels about the Holocaust as a chance to explain the common failures of postmodernism and the complicated history of postmodern post-Holocaust prose

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Marta Tomczok presents all Polish postmodern novels about the Holocaust, starting with "The First Splendor" and ending with "The Suspected Dybbuk" by Andrzej Bart. She also presents their rich relationships with selected foreign-language prose, which intensified especially at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The culmination of the entire trend is a discussion around two novels: "Tworek" by Marek Bienczyk and "Fabryka Mucholapek" by Andrzej Bart, which reveals the aestheticizing and post-memorial profile of Polish post-modernization and its advantage over the historiosophical trend. This monograph is not only the first such collection of post-Holocaust postmodern novels, but also the first comprehensive study of postmodernism in the literature about the Holocaust, which, thanks to comparative analysis, tries to analyze and explain the circumstances of the appearance and later disappearance of this trend from cultural landscape of the world and Poland.