Amy Hungerford

This work of literary criticism aims to invigorate and 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. Hungerford uses five examples to build up her theme. First, she shows how criticism of images of the Holocaust in Sylvia Plath’s poetry effectively personifies the poems into “something like persons” (18). Second, she uses works like Fahrenheit 45, which feature genocide, to show how this personification has made possible the concept of the destruction of persons and culture. For her third example, she focuses on the event of the Holocaust itself. She outlines a group of things that are not texts that have worked to ensure the transmission of the event of the Holocaust to future generation who could not have experienced it. For Hungerford, this raises questions (in light of genocide) around why a particular culture should survive. Fourth, Hungerford turns to leading arguments in trauma theory to show how the reading of certain texts are themselves traumatic experiences which can be experienced by and transmissible to persons. Finally, she turns to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth to show how it can be possible to think about the relationship between a person and a culture without conflating the two. 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).… (més)