The laugh of Merlin in representations of the Holocaust: Fiction,Film and Television.
The laugh of Merlin in representations of the Holocaust: Fiction,Film and Television.
This thesis explores a narrative strategy employed by many survivor writers in their Holocaust narratives, building on the work of Lawrence Langer and Michael Andre Bernstein concerning the nature of contemporary responses to the Holocaust. I argue that this strategy creates a textual moment of confrontation, which I refer to as the Laugh of Merlin, that challenges the contemporary assumptions brought to the text by the reader. Although this narrative strategy is related to a wide range of genres within the thesis, I have focused on fictional narratives which provide a comparative context for the variety of texts discussed. The Laugh of Merlin therefore acts as a basis for an examination of survivor and non-survivor fictions, film and television texts.
Chapter one examines survivor fictions such as The Cattle Truck, and A Scrap of Time, pinpointing and exploring the textual moment of Merlin's Laugh and arguing that the narrative strategy that creates the Laugh can be used as a blueprint for all narratives concerning the Holocaust. This reading aims to bring together survivor and non-survivor narratives and functions as a pro-active tool that makes explicit the interdependent nature of all Holocaust representations. Wolfgang Iser's reader response theory is used to illuminate the terms of the narrative strategy and to outline the potential effects of the Laugh of Merlin on the reader. The synthesis of critical and creative texts is continued in chapter two which discusses non-survivor narratives such as The Reader. This chapter also argues that Holocaust narratives are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary in their nature and provides a precise of the docu-drama genre as well as an examination of Beach Music, a more popular, commercialised text. To contextualise Merlin's Laugh these narratives are examined with reference to the contemporary theoretical studies of Gillian Rose, Sue Vice and Homi Bhabha.
University of Southampton
Newman, Petra
f6669bd4-4196-4545-94e7-75e6d43bf013
2001
Newman, Petra
f6669bd4-4196-4545-94e7-75e6d43bf013
Newman, Petra
(2001)
The laugh of Merlin in representations of the Holocaust: Fiction,Film and Television.
University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.
Record type:
Thesis
(Doctoral)
Abstract
This thesis explores a narrative strategy employed by many survivor writers in their Holocaust narratives, building on the work of Lawrence Langer and Michael Andre Bernstein concerning the nature of contemporary responses to the Holocaust. I argue that this strategy creates a textual moment of confrontation, which I refer to as the Laugh of Merlin, that challenges the contemporary assumptions brought to the text by the reader. Although this narrative strategy is related to a wide range of genres within the thesis, I have focused on fictional narratives which provide a comparative context for the variety of texts discussed. The Laugh of Merlin therefore acts as a basis for an examination of survivor and non-survivor fictions, film and television texts.
Chapter one examines survivor fictions such as The Cattle Truck, and A Scrap of Time, pinpointing and exploring the textual moment of Merlin's Laugh and arguing that the narrative strategy that creates the Laugh can be used as a blueprint for all narratives concerning the Holocaust. This reading aims to bring together survivor and non-survivor narratives and functions as a pro-active tool that makes explicit the interdependent nature of all Holocaust representations. Wolfgang Iser's reader response theory is used to illuminate the terms of the narrative strategy and to outline the potential effects of the Laugh of Merlin on the reader. The synthesis of critical and creative texts is continued in chapter two which discusses non-survivor narratives such as The Reader. This chapter also argues that Holocaust narratives are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary in their nature and provides a precise of the docu-drama genre as well as an examination of Beach Music, a more popular, commercialised text. To contextualise Merlin's Laugh these narratives are examined with reference to the contemporary theoretical studies of Gillian Rose, Sue Vice and Homi Bhabha.
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Published date: 2001
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Local EPrints ID: 464569
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/464569
PURE UUID: 59278d97-84e6-4c33-8546-b64d326ac067
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Date deposited: 04 Jul 2022 23:47
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 19:37
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Author:
Petra Newman
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