The holocaust of texts Book

The major problem I have with this work is that it often oversimplifies the criticism and writers it argues against. For instance, Hungerford argues that "the very autonomy of the text in de Man's account threatens to replace, or rather to erase, not only the writer, then, but also the text's own existence as writing" (65). However, in his work on autobiography, de Man argues not that the text replaces the writer, but that it determines the writer just as much as the writer determines the text. They don't replace one another so much as continually produce one another. This complexity is also missing when she claims that Roth "turns persons into texts" (139) and not the reverse. If people can be turned into texts, it seems clear one ramification is that people are textual, which opens up the possibility of personifying texts.

In this same vein, she reads the use of personification by Felman in discussing Holocaust survivor Simon Srebnik's return from the dead as "no longer metaphoric and abstract but real . . ." It's fairly clear that Felman does not believe she is resurrecting Srebnik but his experience. Personification, after all, is figurative.

Her reading of "Maus" also reduces Spiegelman's complex work to a simplistic text. She argues that Art's calling her dad a murder because he burned his mother's diaries posits that people and texts are the same thing, yet she misses that we don't have to view this use of "murder" as literal but rather as an accusation of figurative killing. In writing about Art's use of another's memory to depict some scenes, she claims that "In the practical work of forging narrative connections with the past, then, one's own memory becomes irrelevant; someone else's narrative provides the material for one's own" (91). However, the work instead seems to be arguing that our memory is dependent upon others' memories. Our memory is both ours and others'.

There are other problems I have with the book, particularly her dismissal of the problems that arise from a Bellow character comparing the Holocaust to a Native American slipping and falling to his/her death as well as her choice not to engage with how Roth's "Operation Shylock" complicates her claims about his fiction. Overall, an unsatisfactory work.