Romanticism after Auschwitz

the long version

Romanticism After Auschwitz argues that romanticism and its rhetoric must be rethought on the basis of two circumstances: the failure of literary historical models to account for the texts that we call "romantic" and the uncomfortable endurance of the tropes and figures associated with romanticism in one of the most insistently anti-romantic discourses, post-Holocaust testimony. Guyer focuses in particular on prosopopoeia, the figure through which the lifeless are animated and the voiceless made to speak." "Through provocative readings of canonical texts (including Shelley's Frankenstein, Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Resnais' Night and Fog) and careful consideration of texts less familiar to an English-language audience, Romanticism After Auschwitz challenges us to see what is disturbing in the gestures that seem most ethical and vivifying. In these pages, Agamben meets Wordsworth, Shakespeare meets Celan, de Man meets Antelme, film meets lyric poetry, testimony meets fiction. Through each encounter, an account of the rhetoric of ethical dispositions emerges and gives readers an attentive, moving way of understanding the condition of human survival after the Holocaust."--BOOK JACKET.