The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (2003)

Hungerford, Amy. The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. University of Chicago Press, 2003.

This work of literary criticism aims to pioneer a new dimension in postwar literary discourse. Hungerford uses the historical event of the Holocaust and the subsequent academic movements of the New Criticism and deconstruction theory to show how the concept of personification (specifically the conflation of author and text, leading the text to be spoken of as the author) has taken on a new level of meaning in the collective consciousness, given that the genocide of WWII has made the fantastic possible (this is an antecedence to postmodernist thought). In Hungerford’s own words, “the understandings of literature and understandings of holocaust are connected by certain beliefs about the nature of representation and its relation to persons in the second half of the twentieth century” (12). This phenomenon of personification is not new (Hungerford gives the example of the destruction of Don Quixote’s library in the eponymous book), but personification takes on a new galvanization of life and death in our postwar discourse, and in reaction to this conflation, the schools of New Criticism and deconstruction place emphasis on the autonomy of the text, the divorcement of author and text. This is not to say that these schools render texts lifeless; in fact, “deconstructive critics imagined a text that was radically autonomous, even active.” Throughout the critics of this era, we find a tension between critics who want to homogenize author and text, and those who want separation. To conclude the work, Hungerford takes the stance that we should work to “resist personifying texts or tying them in literal ways to the people who wrote them” because when we conflate author and text we “constrict our freedom (to disagree, to read, not to read)” and limit our imagination (if a text truly represents a person or culture that we can directly experience, this effectively elides the need for our imagination) (155).