Curriculum and the Holocaust: Competing Sites of Memory and Representation

by Marla Morris

Overview

In this book, Morris explores the intersection of curriculum studies, Holocaust studies, and psychoanalysis, using the Holocaust to raise issues of memory and representation. Arguing that memory is the larger category under which history is subsumed, she examines the ways in which the Holocaust is represented in texts written by historians and by novelists. For both, psychological transference, repression, denial, projection, and reversal contribute heavily to shaping personal memories, and may therefore determine the ways in which they construct the past. The way the Holocaust is represented in curricula is the way it is remembered. Interrogations of this memory are crucial to our understandings of who we are in today's world. The subject of this text--how this memory is represented and how the process of remembering it is taught--is thus central to education today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781135649470
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/01/2001
Series:	ISSN
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	278
File size:	436 KB

About the Author

Marla Morris

Table of Contents

Contents: Preface. Curriculum Theory and the Holocaust. A Psychoanalytic Hermeneutic. Representation and the Effects of Anti-Semitism. Memory and History. Memory Text of Holocaust Histories. Memory Text of Holocaust Novels. Under the Sign of a Dystopic Curriculum.

Editorial Reviews

Warning readers that this is not a happy book, Morris (Georgia Southern U.) analyzes curricular, psychoanalytic, historical, and fictive writing on the Holocaust. She discusses curriculum theory and the Holocaust, a psychoanalytic hermeneutic, representation and the effects of anti-Semitism, memory and history, the memory text of Holocaust histories and novels, and under the sign of a distopic curriculum. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"A remarkable achievement....The question of the Holocaust and its representation is important to our work in curriculum....Refusing to treat the Holocaust as metaphor, Marla Morris nevertheless uses the Holocaust to raise issues of memory and representation....She explores the issues from a variety of discipline perspectives—psychoanalysis, history, literature—and the breadth of her sources is wide....Morris deals with the issue perceptively and insightfully....Her material is provocative.....[Her] argument is forceful."
—Alan A. Block
University of Wisconsin, Stout

"The question of the Holocaust continues to loom large in contemporary intellectual work and across many disciplines....It has become, perhaps, the defining event of this time. Interestingly, within educational studies there are few works that seriously address the Holocaust and this book begins to fill that void....There can be little question of [Morris'] command and knowledge of relevant scholarship....I learned much about this subject from her writing....This book will appeal to those of us concerned with curriculum as this connects to questions of human transformation and social justice...those concerned with the significance of postmodern thinking on the teaching of history, and...those specifically interested in the teaching of the holocaust."
—H. Svi Shapiro
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

From the Publisher