Engaging the Shoah through the Poetry of Dan Pagis
Memory and Metaphor
By (author) Shellie Gordon McCullough
Publication date:
21 December 2016Length of book:
142 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
239x159mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781498532877
In the field of Holocaust Studies, there has been a great deal written in English about poets such as Paul Celan, but Dan Pagis’s body of work remains largely undiscovered. By analyzing the Holocaust poetry of Dan Pagis and correlating it to his biography through the identifying tropes of Pagis’s literature, this book seeks to reveal that the speakers of Pagis’ poems embody a resistance to traditional historical, temporal, and structural narratives while also outlining the scarring effects of trauma continually revisited through poetic engagement. Beyond this, the secondary aim of this book is to bring Pagis’s work to light for an audience that solely reads and speaks English.
This book offers McCullough’s path-breaking study of Dan Pagis’ philosophical-literary poetry. She discusses and explicates Pagis’ reaction to the trauma of the Holocaust and analyzes in depth the poet’s difficult yet powerful lyrical approach, demonstrating both his concepts of the limits of representation and the end of the Jewish people after the Holocaust.