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Generational Representations of Trauma in Holocaust Graphic Narratives

Annual Spring Theodore “Zev” Weiss Lecture in Holocaust Studies featuring Victoria Aarons (Trinity University) 

We find ourselves now, in the early decades of the 21st century, at a critical turning point in post-Holocaust history, an era that will witness the end of lived testimony. In recent decades, the graphic novel, with its juxtaposition of image and text, has become increasingly a medium for serious and complex expression of individual and collective histories in the performance of memory. Victoria Aarons will discuss the complex ways in which graphic novelists and memoirists, through visual tropes of memory, create the material shape of witnessing and loss as a way of entering the traumatic narrative of history in response to the Holocaust as it extends in both recollected and imagined memory.