Probing the Limits of Representation

“What might it mean to call the Holocaust a ‘crisis in form’…the Shoah nonetheless challenges our powers to draw something like a meaning, or maybe even more than one, from this powerful sense of meaningfulness. At the same time that it renders the task of historical comprehension ethically imperative, it threatens to expose the inadequacies, or at the very least the limitations of our familiar modes of coming to understand cultural events.”—Irene Tucker, Poetics Today