About

"Philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno, whose father was Jewish, states that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism’, with a particular emphasis on the 'aesthetics' of such poetry (Adorno, 1983). Antony Rowland suggests that perhaps Adorno did not wish to negate representation, but sought instead to highlight the inadequacies of the language used to represent the Holocaust (Rowland, 1997). The academic discourse around representation presents a conflict between the concepts of bearing witness to the events of the Holocaust, and the inadequacy of the language to do so in a meaningful way (Adorno, 1983; Wiesel; Lang, 2000). The limitation of language is central to my research, and the solution, I argue, is not to choose one over the other, but to instead develop a way in which writers can tell the Holocaust whilst preserving historical accuracy and protecting the absences and silences in the archive, thus avoiding the potentially unethical fictionalisation of the lived experiences of those who were persecuted. 

My thesis will draw on archival material, including Holocaust records, reports, propaganda, and other historical documents, to inform an original method of blackout poetry as a way of identifying an adequate language to creatively represent the Holocaust. It will also contain a 30,000-word critical component. I will identify methodologies and methods that do not sensationalise or aestheticise the Holocaust, contributing to existing discourse by developing a way of using archives to inform an anthology of blackout poetry. Blackout poetry as a process involves selecting words or letters from a pre-existing text, such as a document, and obscuring the rest, leaving behind a new narrative. This process will be driven by a familial autoethnographic methodology, enabling me to integrate my fragmented Jewish ancestry and lived experience within the wider cultural context."