The Rhetoric of Disaster and the Imperative of Writing.pdf

8/12/2019 The Rhetoric of Disaster and the Imperative of Writing.pdf

1/23

The Rhetoric of Disaster and the Imperative of WritingAuthor(s): Michael Bernard-DonalsSource: Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter, 2001), pp. 73-94Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3886402Accessed: 07/07/2009 19:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=taylorfrancis .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Rhetoric SocietyQuarterly.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3886402?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=taylorfrancishttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=taylorfrancishttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/3886402?origin=JSTOR-pdf


2/23

Michael Bernard-Donals

THE RHETORIC OF DISASTER AND THE IMPERATIVE OF

WRITING

Abstract: This essay defines a "rhetoric of disaster," traces its origins inMaurice Blanchot and its connection to trauma theory, explains how itworks nfigural terms to present what otherwise defies representation, andsuggests a relation between the events of history and testimonial evidencethat accounts for the uncanny effect of some representations of the Shoah.In doing so it examines three touchstone texts whose sources are profoundlytraumatic events: a diary of the Warsaw ghetto written by Abraham Lewin,eyewitness testimonyfrom the FortunoffArchives at Yale University, and a"memoir" by Binjamin Wilkomirski whose origin and authenticity has beenrecently and hotly disputed. The essay argues that because an event likethe Shoah presents the writer (and her audience) with a limit to writingwhich destabilizes what we traditionally think of as knowledge, theconsequences of a rhetoric of disaster are troubling. The second half ofthis essay lays out some of those consequences in both pedagogical andethical terms. If writing the Holocaust confronts us with something "other"than knowledge, in Blanchot 's terms, it is doubtful that we can simply obeythe ethical imperative never to forget that which we cannot remember, etalone know.

T he two most emphatic injunctions attached to the representation of theShoah appear mutually exclusive: the first is to burn the events of the

Holocaust into memory so that they may not be repeated (see Wiesel;Berenbaum); he second is to resist the idolatry of representation altogetherand remain silent in the face of the most horrible of atrocities (see Koch;Lang, "Introduction"). The first injunction urges us to speak of the events ofthe Shoah, while the second urges us to avoid speaking of them. It is theimpasse between speech and silence, memory and forgetting, that MauriceBlanchot calls the disaster of writing. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchotcalls the disaster "the limit of writing," a limit that "de-scribes," or unwritesthe object of writing (7). The book is an extended rumination on how theevents of history are to be found in writing, but in such a way that they pre-cede and interrupt he language of anyone who tries to find a name, or anarrative, with which to contain those events. Writing "brings o the surfacesomething ike absent meaning," something "which is not yet what we wouldcall thought" because the event precedes the writer's ability to make sense ofit, and-like the sublime object-confounds the categories that would other-wise be available to regularize it (41).

73 RSQ: Rhetoric Society QuarterlyVolume 31, Number 1 Winter 2001


3/23

74 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY

I intend in this essay to lay out what might be called a rhetoric of disas-

ter, explain how it works in figural terms, and to suggest a relation betweenthe events of history and testimonial evidence taken as history that accountsfor the uncanny effect of some representations f the Shoah. In so doing, I'llrefer to three ouchstones, exts whose sources are profoundly raumatic vents(though-in the last case-they may not be the events of the Holocaust): adiary of the Warsaw ghetto written by Abraham Lewin, eyewitness testimonyfrom the Fortunoff Archives at Yale University, and a memoir by BinjaminWilkomirski whose origin and authenticity has been recently and hotly dis-puted. If it is true that writing an event like the Shoah presents the writer

(and her audience) with a limit to knowledge, rather han knowledge of theevent, and that this limit destabilizes what we traditionally hink of as knowl-edge, then the consequences of a rhetoric of disaster are troubling. The sec-ond half of this essay will lay some of those consequences out in both peda-gogical and ethical terms. If writing the Holocaust confronts us with some-thing "other" han knowledge, in Blanchot's terms, how do we obey the ethi-cal imperative never to forget that which we simply cannot remember, etalone know? The answer s that we cannot: a rhetoric of disaster, ounded ona displacement of knowledge rather han ts production, presents us with animpossible ethics: to remember hat which we cannot possibly write as knowl-edge.

The question of how fully a state of affairs can be rendered discursivelyis especially pressing in the case of historical discourse, in which the verac-ity or coherence of eyewitness testimony-the testimony's ability to renderor represent a series of events in terms that are plausible or verifiable-is oneof the pillars on which the historical reality or truth of events rests. The stron-ger the testimony-the greater ts coherence and the degree to which it cansecure the assent of an audience and allow its members to understand whathappened-the more willing we are to grant that the event that lies at itssource occurred he way the witness says. But history's relation to testimony-the relation of the events of history to history itself-has been a vexed onefrom the beginning of the rhetorical tradition. To cite only one canonicalexample, Aristotle takes for granted history's status as a record of what hashappened in the Rhetoric (1 360a36; 1393b25 ff.), suggesting that the politi-cal orator may find historical precedent useful for arguing a current ase. Yetin the Poetics, Aristotle makes a distinction between poetry and history, sug-gesting that the former is more a philosophical discourse than the latter, as itdeals with that "which is possible as being probable or necessary" 1451b1).In other words, while testimony may serve as evidence, it is not necessarilythe best indication of the nature of events. The record of what happened may


4/23

BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORIC FDISASTER 75

not give the fullest or most adequate representation f the events to which the

witness testified.The ongoing discussion of ethos and kairos in the rhetorical tradition

can be seen as ways of contending with the status of testimony (see Bernard-Donals, "Ethos"; Sullivan). As a means of securing assent, ethos-the ex-tent to which the speaker s able both to do justice to the object of discourse(to get it right), and to adhere o the good while leading the audience towardthe good as well-has traditionally been understood as deriving from the textitself and to some degree from external factors like the speaker's history orcharacter. Whether it was established primarily through the persuasive act or

through he audience's prior knowledge of the speaker's virtue has been opento speculation from the outset of the rhetorical radition see Johnson). Whatthis means for someone like Aristotle is that n the best of circumstances, thespeaker hews to the truth of the matter and, in so doing, is more likely to beseen by an audience as someone of good character. Quintilian's "good manspeaking well" was essentially a responsible speaker who was knowledge-able not just about his subject, but also about virtue, both in himself and inhis audience; the best testimony was both logically coherent and adhered tothe principles of goodness.

Both the intrinsic and extrinsic raditions-what James Baumlin has calledthe "rhetorical" and the "philosophical" views of ethos-become troubledwhen confronted with testimonies of events like the Shoah, events whoseweight of atrocity seem to leave a hole in the fabric of narrative. Inherent nHolocaust testimonies, ike other estimonies of trauma pace Langer Felman),are the "anguished memories" that make themselves apparent n survivor'sattempts to write the disaster of their experiences during the events of thewar. Langer's point is that the distance between what has been witnessedand what can be committed to testimony-what was seen and what can besaid-is often wide and always palpable: not only in the witness's state-ments but in the shrugged shoulders, the winces, the tears, and the silencesthat punctuate he oral testimonies and that are aestheticized but not domes-ticated in the written language of figure. On extrinsic criteria (the philo-sophical view), the worth of a discourse, regardless of its ability to produceknowledge or to accurately record an event, can always be called into ques-tion if we can impeach the character or the veracity of a speaker who cannottell us precisely what happened n terms we can recognize. How could whatthey say be possible, we might ask? On intrinsic criteria the rhetorical view),a testimony would have to agree with or at least corroborate a good deal ofother eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust in order to tell a certain truth. Itwould have to represent a reality to which other witnesses have testified andwhich is internally coherent. (See Daniel O'Keefe's book, particularly hechapter on "Source Factors," or a description of how this problem is treated


5/23


in psychology and communication research; or views more consistent with

contemporary ritical and historiographical heory, see Carlo Ginzburg's andMartin Jay's essays on the problems of verifiability of witnesses in the caseof disasters like the Shoah.) Holocaust testimony is often both extrinsicallyincredible-the events to which the witness testifies seem impossible, un-real- and intrinsically incoherent-exhibiting gaps, silences, and disjunc-tions.

On an "indicative" criterion, however-by paying attention to what re-sides behind the language of the discourse rather han n the speaker's virtueor the degree to which the discourse can be squared with a state of affairs

then the extent to which a discourse has an ethical or moral authority, and theextent to which we might say that the speaker or writer s "telling the truth,"depends on the discourse's ability to move an audience to "see" an issue oran event that exceeds language's ability to narrate t. In terms of kairos,rather han providing he criteria hat would secure appropriate eactions roman audience based upon the constraints of time and place in which they findthemselves, such a discourse would explode time and place, and indicatewhat Sullivan calls a "fullness of time" that lies beyond any definable his-torical situation. An "indicative" or "epideictic") criterion can be foundnot in the Aristotelian paradigm but in the Platonic one: in the former, ethosfinds its source in the virtue of the speaker and that it has an effect upon thequality of knowledge that the speech produces; n the latter t finds its sourcein the speech's ability to indicate (though perhaps not produce) knowledge,and to the extent that it manages to indicate what lies beyond the contingen-cies of the world the speaker may be considered of better or worse character.In Phaedrus and Gorgias, Plato suggests that language leads speaker andlistener to Truth by indicating rather han by producing t. Socrates' secondspeech on love (Phaedrus 244a-257b) figurally represents the cosmologywhereby an investment in love and beauty brings souls closer to their pointof origin; it does not produce knowledge of that cosmology. But the figuraleffect of the speech-as well as the object of representation tself, a mne-monic whereby the soul is perfected as it glimpses an object that reminds itof its former perfection-indicates what lies beyond the contingencies of theworld (where, in the Gorgias [469b-c], Socrates magines the possibility of astate of affairs in which he may neither do nor suffer harm). The relationbetween truth as content and what lies beyond truth-what might be called,in psychoanalytic terms the "real"-is the matter at issue in the debate, latein the Phaedrus, on the value of writing. When, in Socrates' retelling of themyth of the origins of writing, Ammon charges that writing is not a drug formemory, but for reminding (275a), he is making a claim similar to the oneSocrates makes in his second speech on love about the perfection of the soul:that in seeing the beauty of the lover, the soul is reminded of its origin in


6/23

BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORIC FDISASTER 77

perfection and is compelled to return there (249b-e). Writing cannot bring

the object of knowledge to the reader, any more than the lover can bringabout the perfection of the soul. But writing does (in Socrates' words) re-mind the reader of it, but does not represent the object. In fact, the conun-drum for Plato's Socrates is whether rhetoric produces truth or an image oftruth, and most readers of the Phaedrus suggest that the best it can do is thelatter. What writing and, ideally, rhetoric can do, however, is indicate thatwhich is "really written in the soul" (278a), what lies at the source of lan-guage-what lies at its point of origin but to which language does not pro-vide unfettered access.'

It is precisely this relation between language and the events that precedeor lie outside it - between writing and the disaster-that occupies Blanchot'sattention in The Writing of the Disaster. There Blanchot makes clear thatexperience is a state of being that requires knowledge. The occurrence of theevent in which a person is implicated and sees herself as such precedes expe-rience. It is immediate: "not only [does it] rule out all mediation; it is theinfiniteness of a presence such that it can no longer be spoken of' (24). Inthe occurrence of the event, the individual s "expose[d] to unity": n order torender he occurrence as an experience at all-in order for the occurrence tobe seen as an event-the individual becomes defined as a subject. She be-comes an "I" over against which the event can also be identified, given at-tributes, and finally named. At the moment the individual recognizes theoccurrence of the event as an experience, and herself as the subject of expe-rience, the event "falls in its turn outside being" (24). Experiences, recog-nized by the witness and named, are nonetheless haunted by their status asevents, and "the names [are] ravaged by the absence that preceded them"-the event now lost to memory except as a name-and "seem remainders,each one, of another anguage, both disappeared and never yet pronounced, alanguage we cannot even attempt o restore without reintroducing hese namesback into the world" (58).

Cathy Caruth's work on trauma substantiates his claim: what the wit-ness sees isn't available to memory because seeing precedes the witness'sability to know what she sees. Once an experience occurs, it is forever lost,and it is at the point of "losing what we have to say," that we speak (Blanchot21). It is the point at which the event is lost that writing begins. For we don'tremember a traumatic vent so much as we forget it; we "take eave of it," inCaruth's erms, though it leaves an indelible mark on everything we say in-cluding the subject of the narrative of the event. The distance between whathas been witnessed and what can be committed to testimony-what was seenand what can be said-is often wide and always palpable: not only in thewitness's statements but in the shrugged shoulders, the winces, the tears, andthe silences that punctuate he oral testimonies and that are aestheticized but


7/23


not domesticated in the written language of figure. Asked to describe the

death of her mother in the Lodz ghetto, the survivor named Mary R. lapsesinto a recitation with which she is familiar as docent at a Holocaust museum:"very difficult; I don't even like to think about t. In all eleven million civil-ian people killed in the concentration camps ..." (Stanovick 1-2). Such anintrusion upon narrative-typical of some survivor testimonies-is a markof something else, the event that troubles history.

The testimony of Moses S. offers another example of the apparent m-passe between the event and experience, what has happened and what can berepresented.

Two boys having one bunk. One said to the other, "Will you watchafter my piece of bread? I'm going to the bathroom." He said, "OK."When he come back, was no bread. Where was the bread?

" I'm sorry. I ate it up."So he reported to the Kapo. Kapo comes along, he said, "What

happened?"" Look, I ask him to look after my piece of bread, and he ate it

up."

The Kapo said, "You took away his life, right?"He said, "Well, I'll give it back this afternoon, he ration."He said, "No, come outside." He took the fellow outside. "Lie on

the floor." He put a piece of brett [board] on his neck, and with hisboots-bang On his neck. Fertig [finished] (FVA tape T-5 11)

What is perhaps most chilling about this tape is not the content of the story-of the experience-itself, but of what cannot be placed into the narrative: hecracking of the board against the child's neck, the quick, almost frantic walkoutside the barracks o the yard, the look of panic in the boy's eyes just be-fore the Kapo sentences him to death. They find no place in the language ofnarrative, but they do have a place in the testimony of Moses S.: in his ges-tures. Here, in the no-place of the narrative, s the gaping, open wound, thedisaster of experience seen by Moses S. (who may be the other boy; we neverfind out) and that is witnessed only in terms of the ending-fertig -or theabsence of Moses's own place in the historical circumstances he narrates. InLanger's terms, the self caught up in the time during the killing wins thebattle over the present, so sickening the interviewer and Moses's wife thatthey both urge him to call it quits. But on Blanchot's terms, the witness ismaking present an absence that so disrupts his present that they become ab-solutely inseparable, so much so that Moses's language becomes submergedby his gestures, and he actually, with a motion of his hands and his feet,becomes the Kapo and finishes the memory with the violence that killed the


8/23


9/23


and patient, iteral and figurative anguage, and makes that case for the reader

than it is not one or the other of these poles that ought to be the object ofhistorical nquiry but rather he writing itself and the way that it resists read-ing, or naming, or knowledge. In other words, it resists verisimilitude, thewill to representation.

One way to think of verisimilitude s in terms of the rhetorical or poeti-cal figure, and the degree to which figure makes present a state of affairs andholds the reader's attention on matters of language. Metaphor s tradition-ally understood as a figure that works by way of substitution: n Aristotle'sexample, "there stands the ship," the term "anchored" s substituted for the

term "stands," and through he difference between the spoken word and theunspoken (but intuited) one, our attention s focused not only upon the close-ness of one set of experiences (which we may recognize) and another whichwe may not); it is also focused upon its dependence upon language. Depend-ing on the number of terms that are substituted n the silence of the analogy(and in Aristotle's understanding of poeisis, the skilled speaker could holdfour terms n a relation of similarity n a single figure) the reader or listener'sability to individuate the terms in use becomes jarring as the distance be-tween them in the analogy grows. In an extreme circumstance-kenosis, inwhich a set of terms is so far removed, in terms of similarity, from anotherthat t begins to systematically undo their claim to order-metaphor "breaksup a totality into discontinuous fragments" (De Man 275), disordering ourillusion of the coherence of the real supplied by figure, and forcing upon usthe realization that the chain of signification (founded upon metonymy, arelation of contiguity rather han substitution) s just that, a chain that is un-hitched from the world of the real.

White's assumption s that the metonymic relation-in which the termssubstituted or one another are so closely related that they repeat themselvesendlessly-is that upon which "normal" discourse (or, perhaps, historicaldiscourse) is founded. In an essay on figurative language, ThomasMcLaughlin says of metonymy that it "accomplishes ts transfer of meaningon the basis of associations that develop out of specific contexts," and "that trelies on connections that build up over time and the associations of usage"(83, 84). For White, the importance of metonymy is that the terms placed inrelation ("sail," "ship") are assumed to be related in the given context, andbecause of what he calls this extrinsic relation (that there must be some orderof reality outside the discursive situation that provides the context in whichthese terms may be related), the reader s able to understand more clearly theaspects of the reality he metonymic igure s meant o distinguish Metahistory34-6). In other words, metonymy, hrough a repetition of different aspects ofthe same reality, offers the reader a clearer, more direct understanding of thenature of the reality being described. With metonymy, cause-effect relation-


10/23

BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORIC F DISASTER 81

ships are so well established that we are lulled into believing that what we

are being given is a description of the real under a paradigm. Metaphordistances us from our ability to regularize our assumptions about the realitypurportedly being described. Metonymy is transitive, whereas metaphor s-or at least has the capacity to be-intransitive (see White, Metahistory 37-8);metonymy assumes that history (the context presumed to be exterior to dis-course) is the origin of language, whereas metaphor assumes that anguage isthe origin of the historical real.

But Blanchot tells us that when an individual bears witness to an event,particularly an event like the murder of a child or the destruction of one's

culture, the event itself, lost to memory and to knowledge, exerts such apressure on narrative hat t destroys it. In rhetorical erms, the disaster is aneffect of discourse that focuses the reader's attention on the impossibility ofsubstituting oneself for the "I" of the narrative. One implication of thedisaster's effect upon the narrative of history is that regardless of the rhetori-cal vehicle in which we place the event-either in the transparent, metonymiclanguage of chronicle or in the denser, metaphoric anguage of poetry-nonecan do justice to the events that precede writing. Even the language ofchronicle, the relentless shorthand ecord of the events that take place beforethe witness's eyes, would on Blanchot's account be unable to contain thedisaster, the irretrievable vent.

An example of just such a chronicle is Abraham Lewin's account, pub-lished in 1988 under the title A Cup of Tears, of his years in the Warsawghetto. That account was one of several others that were eventually buried inmilk cans in basements n the ghetto and retrieved n the years following theend of the war. Lewin's account, along with the remembrances of otherswho survived the deportations and the camps (and many others who didn't),form the core of the historical accounts of the liquidation of the Warsawghetto. Like the videotaped testimonies provided by survivors, the descrip-tions given by Lewin are oftentimes harrowing: of ruses used by governmentforces to separate children from their parents, acts of brutality both by theGerman military police and by the Jewish police, and the political and theo-logical convolutions of the Jewish councils and other civic organizations asthey tried to justify a consistent response to the orders to be "resettled." ButLewin's account, more so even than those found in the Fortunoff Archive,offers extremes of metonym, abbreviations so transparent as to put pressureon White's distinctions between normal history and figural representation.Lewin writes, "A night of horrors. Shooting went on all night. I couldn'tsleep," and then lists the names of the families whose members were roundedup and led to the umschlagplatz, where they would be loaded onto trains andsent to Treblinka. The metonymic language of lists is difficult to make senseof, and exceedingly difficult to "read hrough" as a window into the experi-


11/23


ences of someone like Abraham Lewin for three reasons: the context in which

the items on the list are meaningful to the writer s unspoken; he events thatsurround hose listed by the writers are simply unknown to him (the experi-ence of the trains, and the camps); and the occurrence of events, and theirimpact upon the witness, is simply lost to memory, and all we have are tracesin the language of the narrative estimony.

Though Lewin sometimes does provide a historical (or more often thannot a cultural) context in which to understand he event by making compari-sons between objects or events from radically different paradigms n his en-tries (as he does when he compares the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942 to

the worst ordeals of the Jews in the land of Mitzrayim), he more often liststhem in shorthand. They are often tiresomely, gruesomely similar events,and names appear after names, lists that should, on White's accounting, lullthe reader nto understanding hat what is being repeated s simply sameness:"Today he Germans have surrounded he following streets: Gesia, Smocza,Pawia, Lubiecka, and took away all the occupants. Yesterday he followingwere taken away: Khanowicz, Rusak, and Jehoszua Zegal's whole family"(Lewin 146). It takes a footnote by the editor to make the reader understandthat Johoszua Zegal was the grandfather f Lewin's wife Luba, and no notesestablish the context for the names of the streets that were surrounded, andwhat events took their toll upon the inhabitants of the houses on those streetsbordering the Jewish cemetery on the western side of the ghetto. It is theeffect of repetition-of the "transitivity" of metonym, the figure that lullsone into thinking that "I know this," and that allows us to forget that "I wasnot there"-that seems to work against White's claims for transitive writing.

In Blanchot's terms-in terms of the rhetoric of disaster-the positionof the writer (the position of the "I") is here annulled by the zero-point oflanguage, the point at which the events become written and named and si-multaneously-as they are written-dissolve as experiences. The repetitivelanguage of metonym here, in which street names and family names are runtogether as a litany of destruction, seem alien to both the writer and to thereader. It is a language unconnected to the network of other words or signsthat might make possible even an imaginary position from which to see andunderstand heir object. Writing-any writing-involves two moments thatwork against each other: the moment in which we create a name for the ob-ject, and that in which the object itself, which becomes lost in the moment ofwriting, exerts a pressure upon the language of the name, or narrative, ofhistory.

In Lewin's diary we see this entry, written on the day after his wife offourteen years is taken away and transported:

Eclipse of the sun, universal blackness. My Luba was taken away


12/23


during a blockade on 30 Gesia Street. There is still a glimmer of hope

in front of me. Perhaps she will be saved. And if, God forbid, she isnot? My journey o the Umschlagplatz-the appearance f the streets-fills me with dread. To my anguish there is no prospect of rescuingher. It looks like she was taken directly to the train. Her fate is to bea victim of the Nazi bestiality, along with hundreds of thousands ofJews. I have no words to describe my desolation. I ought to go afterher, to die. But I have no strength to take such a step. Ora-hercalamity. A child who was so tied to her mother, and how she lovedher.

The "action" goes on in the town at full throttle. All the streets arebeing emptied of their occupants. Total chaos. Each German actorywill be closed off in its block and the people will be locked in theirown building. Terror and blackness. And over all this disaster hangsmy own private anguish. (Lewin 153-4)

Here writing obeys the obligation to name: Lewin tries desperately to build aposition from which to write ("my own private anguish," "my desolation") atthe same time that he tries to imagine the other individuals and events thatform the context for his writing ("the people will be locked in their build-ing," "God forbid, if she is not [saved]?"). But neither position is finallyfixed, in part because neither name nor any part of the historical narrativeLewin tries to write can be understood n terms of any other. This is not dueto the historical circumstances in which Lewin is involved, circumstancesthat prevent him from understanding he enormity of the disasters (his ownand that of the ghetto). It is due instead to writing's inability to render whathe sees without reducing it to narrative. At the moment of writing, Lewindisplaces both the "I" and the "other" rom which, and to whom, he writes aswell as the historical event of the disaster. It is this moment of displacement,the moment of writing and of loss, that produces a violence, "the rupture, hebreak the splitting, the tearing of the shred-acute singularity, single point"(Blanchot 46). It is here that events-Luba's deportation, he terror of theirdaughter at being made motherless, the mechanical and awful willingness tocontinue to speak in the face of all this-are omitted from the language of thewriting but are made present in the absence of the writing. The intention towrite is shattered by the event's ability to elude writing.

In both Lewin's diary and in the testimonies by survivors, in both liter-ary representations ike Primo Levi's or in the painful extemporaneity of thediary or the oral testimony, there is something in the events of the Shoah thatresists vraisemblance, and that makes itself apparent n figural (that is, rhe-torical) terms. This is true not only of accounts which, in Langer's terms,"remind us that we are dealing with a self-consciously represented reality"


13/23


(Langer 40) through the language of metaphor, but also those which are de-

signed to be, in White's terms, "read hrough." f we take Blanchot seriously,we need to recognize that there is a certain intransitivity hat occurs evenmetonymically-even in language that on the face of it seems to regularizethe narrative, vraisemblable historical world-in historical texts that rendsopen that apparently historical order and confronts the reader with the disas-ter.

The pedagogical implication of a rhetoric of disaster s complicated and

potentially troubling. Theorists of writing have paid a good deal of attentionin the last several years to the ways in which the events of the Holocaust, asrendered n fiction and in testimonial accounts, can be seen as points of de-parture or discussions of diversity, or race hatred, or the role of resistance,or any number of other controversial opics. The assumption we generallymake in courses like these is that their goal should be to produce knowledgeof the events of the Shoah and, whenever possible, to connect that knowl-edge with other knowledges-of the dynamics of poverty, or of racism, or ofother disasters or genocides. But while there is clear documentary evidenceavailable, for example, to suggest to us the operations of the mobile killingsquads that followed behind the invasion of the Russian and Polish pale, andthough there is enough testimonial evidence to suggest to us the experiencesof individuals involved in the killing (both survivors and collaborators), hatevidence cannot bring knowledge into accord with the events themselves.The problem is a rhetorical one: the severity of the events witnessed defiesthe historically transparent writing we generally assume to be the best ve-hicle for reporting them. The testimony of even the most reliable witnesssuccumbs to the displacement of the events from the language of the narra-tive, and the effect of such a narrative-of its intransitivity-is what SaulFriedlander has called, in another ontext, uncanny. Through t,"we are con-fronted with [an uncertainty brought on by the representation] f human be-ings of the most ordinary kind approaching he state of automata by eliminat-ing any feelings of humanness and of moral sense .... Our sense ofUnheimlichkeit uncanniness] s indeed triggered by this deep uncertainty asto the 'true nature"' of the referent of the narrative tself (Friedlander 30).The effect of the uncanny n the writing class is that, faced with the enormityof the events as described in halting, incomplete and yet horrifying testimo-nies and documents, students have a very difficult time evaluating that writ-ing, let alone trying to find language with which to write themselves. Howcan you possibly assess the authority of the sources you read, and the charac-ter of the witnesses who have written them, when you are absolutely shat-tered by their effect?


14/23

BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORIC OF DISASTER 85

To take only one recent example of this problem, Andrea Freud

Loewenstein writes that during he spring semester of 1996 at Medgar EversCollege, her introduction of Spiegelman's Maus in a second-semester writ-ing course produced ome startling eactions rom classmembers. In addition oseeing the book - a depiction of Art Spiegelman's collection of testimoniesfrom his father, who survived he Holocaust n Poland, n comic book form-asa way to prompt her students o writing, she also saw the section of the coursein which she used the book as an opportunity o "challenge the anti-semitismI heard from my students," and to "think more widely about the origins andeffects of stereotypes and prejudice, o see themselves not only as victims ofstereotyping and prejudice, but also as perpetrators" 419). By asking herstudents to write about the book, and about their identities as "minorities,"Loewenstein's students began to find a language with which to express knowl-edge of Judaism, of the events of the Holocaust, and of their own very com-plicated positions as individuals defined by color, or ethnic category, or gen-der, or various combinations thereof. She concludes that several of her stu-dents "embarked on their own projects: writing comic-strip texts, makingfilms, or writing creatively about their own family situations" (419). Theaccount of the class includes transcripts of her students' conversations andsome excerpts from their writing, writing which seems to indicate a desire tocome to conclusions about the subject of the Shoah and of their experiencesbut which falls short of the mark for various reasons, one of which may bethe pressure-the disaster-of the circumstances of the writing itself.

But Loewenstein's postscript points to the greater difficulty of seeing arelation between the events of history-in this case, Spiegelman's attempt owork through his father's experiences in the camps and his own very difficultexperiences as the son of a Holocaust survivor-and the writing of thoseevents into a narrative of history or of experience. There she tells her readersthat one of her colleagues at Medgar Evers drew her aside to show her apaper n which one of her students had "'really made a leap forward n under-standing,"' n which the student, one of those who'd been in Loewenstein'sclass a year earlier, had lifted sections of a paper from the earlier class andgrafted them into the paper for the second instructor's course on an alto-gether different subject. Loewenstein provides two possible reasons for this:the student was pleased with her insight and "merely decided to recycle it,"or that t was a cynical exercise in giving the (second) teacher what she wanted.But there is another, more fundamental, explanation: the student's sense ofthe material from the classes on Maus, and her ability to record that sense inconventional terms, are irremediably divided by the passage of the events ofthe class from event to experience. Loewenstein, like most teachers, is will-ing to see her student's writing as a faithful record of an insight or under-standing-of learning-that came to the student in class, and that to have


15/23


grafted a passage from that writing nto an essay for a different class is tanta-

mount to a "recycling" of the insight. This is to miss the point, however, thatat best writing s indicative of events, or in this case of ideas, that precede thewriting itself, and that the student may well have seen the recycled passageas bearing the imprint of an event or experience that could not otherwise benarrated. The passage, in other words, may be related both to the "leap for-ward in understanding" xperienced in the second class as well as to theinsight gained in the first, but it is a relation that can only be surmised.

To press the point a little, it's also possible to suggest that the student'swriting marks a universal knowledge that stands n place of a particular one,

that it substitutes a conventional knowledge for a more traumatic, compli-cated, and unwritable sense that is impossible to know except as a momentthat precedes language altogether (for a more troubling view of this samepoint, see Gourevitch, "What hey Saw..."). The passage reads, in part:

We were both [Blacks and Jews] packed like sardines and sent awayfrom our homelands, he Jews by trains and the Blacks by boat. ...[T]heGerman solution for the Jews was total destruction; the White solu-tion for the Blacks was total utilization.... Unlike the Jews, Blackswere considered more useful alive then [sic] dead. Now whenever Ipass the intersection of New York Ave and Eastern Parkway I can ob-serve the Jews with new insight, comprehension, and realization ofour common experience. (Loewenstein 41 1)

Though the student expresses a sense of her "common experience" as anAfrican American student with those of Jews during the Holocaust, there isclearly more going on here: an expression of anger, a sense of discontinuitybetween the historical circumstances of the Shoah and the middle passage, aconnection between the geography of New York and the machinery of de-struction n Europe and the Atlantic. The student's conclusion is an attemptto forge a knowledge from her particular and very difficult position in themidst of an experience she is at pains to fully understand. What she haswritten, n other words, responds to the disciplinary demands of the writingcourse, and of the pedagogical demands of a teacher whose trajectory or thissection of the class is to foster a sense of diversity and to work against stereo-types. But the language of this passage marks a limit to these imperatives bywriting against them, by exerting a pressure upon them that can't be con-tained by the essay's language. In short, there seems to be some other event,some other insight, that functions as the origin of this narrative, o it shouldcome as no surprise to Loewenstein that the narrative could be used as amarker of something that she herself may not be able to recognize.

What this suggests is that while we may glimpse a trace of the event's


16/23


horror, we do so at the expense of knowledge. Or, to put this another way,

writing he disaster may indicate he event that ruptures narrative, but it doesn'tbuild knowledge of it, and in fact works against knowledge's grain. Theinjunction o see the Holocaust as an event that must never be forgotten, andthat acts as a paradigm or race hatred, or antisemitism, or the cultural logicof fascism, seems to insist upon finding a language with which the events ofthe Holocaust can be written, understood, dentified with or against. But ifthe events of the Shoah are paradigmatic of the intransigence of events towriting, or of the way testimony both creates and destroys the language ofwitnessing, then any attempt to integrate the Holocaust into a pedagogy of

writing needs to deal with the possibility that in asking students to write (on)the Holocaust we are asking them to do something utterly impossible or atthe very least traumatic.

What this means for pedagogy is that we need to resist the temptation tothink of writing as a medium that represents states of affairs. This is trueboth of the writing our students read - in testimonies, histories, and othernarratives and the writing our students produce. Identification of the kindevidenced by Loewenstein's students is only one example of what happenswhen one attempts to bring the traumatic effect of figural displacement (inher case, in Spiegelman's Maus) under a universal knowledge. What theHolocaust shows, perhaps more clearly than other traumatic events, is thatdiscourse cannot represent what has been seen, and that at best it indicatesthe effect upon the witness of what she saw. Even the most explicit attemptto regularize the horrible particularity, o elide what resists naming with aknowledge, indicates, n its incommensurabilities, what lies behind t: "elevenmillion ... six million ... one and a half million"; "Unlike the Jews, Blackswere considered more useful alive than dead ... [I realize] our common ex-perience."

Blanchot worries that by reading the testimonies of events as The Holo-caust, we destroy the effects of the particular:

Fragmentation, he mark of a coherence all the firmer in that it has tocome undone in order to be reached, and reached not through a dis-persed system, or through dispersion as a system, for fragmentation sthe pulling to pieces (the tearing) of that which never has preexisted(really or ideally) as a whole, nor can it ever be reassembled in anyfuture presence whatever. (60)

There is, in the disaster, the beginning of an ethics: the disaster occurs whenone's particular mplication in the event is held up as everyone's implication,making it a universal experience, and producing a knowledge of the whole incontrast to the impasse itself. We are better off focusing our attention on


17/23


those impasses-as revealed in the synechdochic or metonymic stutters n

diaries like Lewin's, or testimonies like those of a Moses S. or a Mary R.-and deferring our students' desires to produce knowledge of the event, to actas though we can ourselves make sense of an event we did not see and did notexperience. If we see writing as an indication of an event rather han a repre-sentation of it, and we make clear to students that even the best writing pro-duces impasse as much as it produces nsights, then perhaps he best we canhope for is that our students produce writing that makes clear the gap orimpasse between the representation and represented, and see their responseto such incongruities as the site of knowing and teaching that keeps horror

itself recognizable.

I want to conclude by indicating one of the ethical implications of arhetoric of disaster. As I intimated at the beginning of the essay, I think thoseimplications complicate some assumptions we generally hold about the eth-ics of Holocaust remembrance-and of redemption-that are usually associ-ated with the injunctions "never forget," and "never again." If Blanchot isright, and a witness's participation n the events of history-particularlytraumatic or horrible events like those indicated by testimonies and diaries ofpeople like Abraham Lewin-are irrecuperable xcept through he fragmentedand troubled narratives hat fail to contain them, then the only connectionbetween the event, as "in-experienced," and the testimony of the event, asthe writing of the disaster, is tenuous at best. In the case of the Lewin diary,it may well serve evidence of the events comprising the concentration andliquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, insofar as it stands as an "eyewitness testi-mony" to those events. And the historical circumstances of the diary itself,found as it was on a site recalled by other witnesses long after the author hadbeen killed and every trace of the ghetto had been annihilated, would seem tobear out and confirm its status as evidence. But what if, for whatever reason,those historical circumstances-corroborating witnesses, documents, placenames recollected-could not be recovered? In such a case, the best we cando is to rely upon the effect of the diary itself. Hayden White would arguethat its status as evidence depends in part upon its effect, and that effect-produced metonymically either by design or by circumstance-is, in the caseof the Lewin diary, a profoundly disturbing one.

The case of the Wilkomirski "memoir" Fragments-initially believed tobe an account of the author's horrifying experiences as a child in the deathcamps, it turns out to be either a willful fabrication or a compilation of night-mare visions and voyeuristic research by someone who believes himself tobe a survivor of Majdanek and Auschwitz (see accounts of the controversy nLappin; Gourevitch, "The Memory Thief')-puts even more pressure on the


18/23

BERNARD-DONALS/RHETORICFDISASTER 89

relation between the effects of a testimony and its source. If we only judge a

testimony by its effects, Fragments works metonymically rather han meta-phorically, and it produces in the reader an uncanny response that could belikened to the effect of the disaster on White's or Blanchot's terms. The bookis a series of horrifying ableaux hat move between the atrocities of the campsand the nightmare of an adoption after the war in which those around himurge the survivor to forget his experiences. But such a result is disturbing-Wilkomirski may be a liar, after all; no one would say the same of AbrahamLewin or Moses S.-and it is all the more profoundly so if it leads, as PhilipBlom has suggested, to an "ero[sion of] the very ground on which remem-

brance can be built" (Blom) and leads eventually to "a new revisionism thatno longer attacks the truth of the Holocaust but only individual claims ofsurvival" (Peskin). Does the ambivalent relation of narrative and the inac-cessible real of history, the difficulties inherent n writing an event and theelusiveness of the event itself, allow for such a radical reading of theWilkomirski memoir, and of eyewitness testimonies as a genre?

It is, in fact, entirely consistent with a rhetoric of disaster hat the natureof events rendered n discourse can only be established ndividually: hat t isimpossible to understand whether or not "the Holocaust" occurred n all ofits horrible detail because any rendering of the event-either through eye-witness testimony or with the broad brushes of history or panoramic filmslike Schindler's List or Shoah-risks giving us the mistaken mpression thatwhat we hear or see in the testimony is what the eyewitness herself saw, orthat the individual narrative can stand as a substitute or the larger historicalnarrative. This was a point made over and over again during he debates thatfollowed the release of Schindler's List in 1994. Critics complained eitherthat the film was too brutal in its use of detail in sequences, for example,depicting the liquidation of the Kracow ghetto or, especially, those involvingthe showers at Auschswitz; or they complained it wasn't detailed enough,and that even the violence of the liquidation scene omitted atrocities thatwould have given the film a greater historical authority. Reviewers in aroundtable discussion printed n the Village Voice n March of that year wor-ried that the American viewing public would equate the movie with the event,and conclude that, in the end, it wasn't all so terrible Hoberman). What wasremarkable about that roundtable discussion, and about nearly every discus-sion that took place after the film's premiere, s that every participant n thedebate "saw" something quite different in the film. This is partly due to thenature of taste, as Kant pointed out so clearly over two hundred years ago.But it is also partly due to the nature of the rhetorical enterprise, on at leastone reading (and I hope a non-idiosyncratic one).

We do not establish truth through discourse as much as we produce ar-guments for a certain view of it, and no argument, no matter how strong and


19/23


no matter the integrity of the speaker, will settle a matter once and for all.

Arguments produce contingent ruths hat can be later tested for consistency,but those contingent truths are established through he argument tself. It issignificant that in this view of rhetoric here are few guarantees hat what isunderstood n one "conversation" r, for our purposes here, testimony, willbe understood he same way in another or by different witnesses to the testi-mony.

To return to where we began this essay, such a view of the rhetoricalenterprise s not new: in the Phaedrus Plato's Socrates is at pains to showthat, ideally, writing is indicative of what lies behind knowledge rather than

productive of knowledge. The successful rhetor s the one who is able toconvince an audience not that what he says is true, but that what he says,while not true, has an effect that points to what occupies a place outside oflanguage: t points to what is real. And this effect-writing as a reminder ofwhat was once inherent n the soul but is now inaccessible to it (Phaedrus277e-278a)-is a radically individual one, an effect which is different fromsoul to soul, from listener to listener, rom witness to witness. To return nowto Philip Blom, he worries that the Wilkomirski narrative ntroduces a newsort of Holocaust denial, one that doesn't question he occurrence of the eventbut the veracity of individual testimonies which, taken together, might tes-tify to the event. And he is right to be concerned. He is right to say that if wecan undermine he authority of the writer of a Holocaust testimony, and saywith certainty hat he was never there and that he did not see what he claimsto have seen, we have eliminated one piece of evidence that we can use toargue that the atrocities of the Shoah occurred. Such testimonies-in theform of eyewitness accounts, documentary evidence, trial transcripts, anddiaries-taken together form the tapestry of suffering that we have inheritedas the narrative of the Holocaust. But such testimonies, as accounts of hor-rible events that are inaccessible even to the memories of those who sur-vived, let alone those who claim to have done so or those who read theiraccounts, function in similar ways and have similar effects: they establishthe credibility of the speaker, and indicate an event as it occurs prior to herability to speak it, not so much in their accordance with the facts of history(facts which are accessible only through narrative) but in the way they dis-rupt the narrative of history and force the reader, or the interviewer, to seesomething horrible, perhaps a trace of the traumatic vent itself.

These effects are only available one witness, one reader, at a time. As inthe case of the Wilkomirski memoir as much as in the case of the Lewindiary, we may well be able to undermine he authority of the speaker if wetake him to be trying to establish a narrative of the circumstances of theHolocaust that will settle the matter once and for all. The converse is alsotrue: a lack of credibility seems to throw open to question the veracity of


20/23


21/23


ceptually to other experiences to which we do have access. Writing itself,

though, shows something like a structure of disaster-we don't know theShoah so much as we catch a glimpse of it in the disfigured language oftestimony and of remembrance. And this uncanny effect-this displacementof knowledge-is disruptive of our own attempts o write in response to theShoah. It stands in the way of our attempts to write disaster as much as itdoes in the diarist's or even, perhaps, he charlatan's. Blanchot is right: "thedisaster ruins everything:" writing, memory, the certainty of knowledge. Butif it also forestalls turning he Shoah into a certainty o be filed away or madesacred, so much the better

Department of EnglishUniversity of Wisconsin

Note'See also Lawrence Rosenfeld's "The Practical Celebration of Epideictic"and

"Central Park and the Celebration of Civic Virtue." The most significant differencebetween Rosenfeld's and Sullivan's notion of the kairotic or epideictic rhetorical radi-tion and the "rhetoric f disaster" describe here is that for the former writers he termsare valorized as overwhelmingly positive. For Rosenfeld and Sullivan, the fullness

presented by epideictic or kairotic rhetoric ecures assent by an irrational mpulse that"shines forth" or produces "ripeness" Sullivan 325, 321), an impulse that brings thereader o mind of the "copious order" of the world that ies just behind he chaos of life(Rosenfeld, "Central Park" 249-52). The disaster, presented by rhetorical means, is acommingling of positive and negative, much more akin to Kant's feeling of sublimity-the arousal of both pleasure and pain, terror and order-than to any positively valo-rized sense of the world. See Bernard-Donals, "Between Sublimity and Redemption";Hartman, "The Book of Destruction;" Steiner, "The Great Tautology".

Works CitedAristotle, Rhetoric. The Rhetoric and Poetics ofAristotle, Ed. W. Rhys Roberts. New

York: Modem Library. 1954/1984.Poetics. The Rhetoric and Poetics ofAristotle. Ed. W. Rhys Roberts. New York:

Modem Library. 1954/1984.Baumlin, James S. And Tita French Baumlin, eds. Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical

and Critical Theory. Dallas: SMU Press, 1994.Berenbaum, Michael. The World Must Know. New York: Little, Brown, 1993.Bernard-Donals, Michael. "Ethos, Witness, and Holocaust 'Testimony': The Rhetoric

of Fragments." Paper delivered at the Conference on College Compositionand Communication, Minneapolis, MN, April, 2000.

"Between Sublimity and Redemption: Toward a Theory of Holocaust Represen-tation." Mosaic 31.1 (Winter 2001): [in press].

Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, NE:University of Nebraska Press, 1995.


22/23


Blom, Philip. "In a Country ..." The Independent (London). 30 September 1998.Features 1+.

Caruth, Cathy. "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History." YaleFrench Studies 79 (1991): 181-92.

De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1984.

Felman, Shoshana. "Education and Crisis, or The Vicissitudes of Teaching." Trauma.Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University.Friedlander, Saul. "The 'Final Solution': On the Unease in Historical Interpretation."

Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World.

Ed. Peter Hayes. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991.Ginzburg, Carlo. "Just One Witness." Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazismand the "Final Solution." Ed. Saul Friedlander. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1992. 82-96.

Gourevitch, Philip. "The Memory Thief." The New Yorker 14 June 1999): 48-68."What hey saw at the Holocaust Museum." New York Times Magazine. February

12, 1995: 44-5.Hartman, Geoffrey. "The Book of Destruction." Probing the Limits of Representa-

tion: Nazism and "The Final Solution." Ed. Saul Friedlander. Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1992. 318-34.

Hoberman, J. "Schindler's List: Myth, Movie, and Memory." Village Voice 29 March1994: 24-31.

Jay, Martin. "Of Plots, Witnesses and Judgments." Probing the Limits of Representa-tion: Nazism and the "Final Solution." Ed. Saul Friedlander. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. 97-107.

Johnson, Nan. "Ethos and the Aims of Rhetoric." Essays on Ancient Rhetoric andModem Discourse. Ed. Robert Connors, Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford.Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. 98-114.

Koch, Gertrud. "Mimesis and Bilderverbot." Screen 34 (Fall 1993): 211-22.Lang, Berel. Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1990."Introduction." Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang. New York: Holmes

and Maier, 1988. 1-15.Langer, Lawrence. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1991.Lappin, Elena."The Man with Two Heads." Granta 66 (Summer 1999): 7-65.Lewin, Abraham. A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Ed. Antony Polonsky.

London: Blackwell, 1988.Loewenstein, Andrea Freud. "Confronting Stereotypes: Maus in Crown Heights."

College English 60.4 (April 1998): 396-420.McLaughlin, Thomas. "Figurative Language." Critical Terms or Literary Study. Ed.

Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1995. 80-90.

O'Keefe, Daniel J. Persuasion: Theory and Research. New York and London: Sage1990.

Peskin, Harvey. "Holocaust Denial: A Sequel." The Nation 14.269 (19 April 1999):


23/23


34.

Plato, Gorgias. Ed. And Trans. James H. Nicholls. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1998.Phaedrus. Ed. And Trans. James H. Nicholls. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1998.Rosenfeld, Lawrence W. "Central Park and the Celebration of Civic Virtue." Ameri-

can Rhetoric: Context and Criticism. Ed. Thomas W. Benson. Carbondale,IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. 221-66.

"The Practical Celebration of Epideictic." Rhetoric n Transition: Studies in theNature and Uses of Rhetoric. Ed. Eugene E. White. University Park, PA:Penn State University Press, 1980. 131-56.

Stanovick, Lucy. Interview with Mary R. St. Louis, MO. March-April 1997.Steiner, Peter. "The Great Tautology." No Passion Spent. New York: Faber, 1996.348-60.

Sullivan, Dale L. "Kairos and the Rhetoric of Belief." Quarterly Journal of Speech 78(August 1992): 317-32.

Vickers, Brian. In Defense of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press,1988.

White, Hayden. "Historical Emplotment nd the Problem of Truth." Probing the Lim-its of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution." Ed. Saul Friedlander.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. 37-53.

Metahistorv: The Historical Imagination n Nineteenth Century Europe. Balti-more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Wiesel, Elie. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1995.Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood. New York:

Schocken, 1995.

The Rhetoric of Disaster and the Imperative of Writing.pdf

Documents

Transcript of The Rhetoric of Disaster and the Imperative of Writing.pdf