Eric J. Sundquist

A comprehensive survey of the most important writing to come out of the Holocaust. Finalist for the 2019 National Jewish Book Award in the Anthologies and Collections Category presented by the Jewish Book Council Silver Winner for Anthologies, 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Writing in Witness is a broad survey of the most important writing about the Holocaust produced by eyewitnesses at the time and soon after. Whether they intended to spark resistance and undermine Nazi authority, to comfort family and community, to beseech God, or to leave a memorial record for posterity, the writers reflect on the power and limitations of the written word in the face of events often thought to be beyond representation. The diaries, journals, letters, poems, and other works were created across a geography reaching from the Baltics to the Balkans, from the Atlantic coast to the heart of the Soviet Union, and in a wide array of original languages. Along with the readings, Eric J. Sundquist’s introductions provide a comprehensive account of the Holocaust as a historical event. Including works by prominent authors such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, as well those little known or anonymous, Writing in Witness provides, in vital and memorable examples, a wide-ranging account of the Holocaust by those who felt the imperative to give written testimony. Eric J. Sundquist is Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, and the editor of many books, including (with David Cesarani) After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence.

A Holocaust Reader

Writing in Witness

“Sundquist’s careful, thoughtful study unearths new and fascinating evidence of the rhetorical traditions in King’s speech.”—Drew D. Hansen, author of The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech That Inspired a Nation “I have a dream”—no words are more widely recognized, or more often repeated, than those called out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963. King’s speech, elegantly structured and commanding in tone, has become shorthand not only for his own life but for the entire civil rights movement. In this new exploration of the “I Have a Dream” speech, Eric J. Sundquist places it in the history of American debates about racial justice—debates as old as the nation itself—and demonstrates how the speech, an exultant blend of grand poetry and powerful elocution, perfectly expressed the story of African American freedom. This book is the first to set King’s speech within the cultural and rhetorical traditions on which the civil rights leader drew in crafting his oratory, as well as its essential historical contexts, from the early days of the republic through present-day Supreme Court rulings. At a time when the meaning of the speech has been obscured by its appropriation for every conceivable cause, Sundquist clarifies the transformative power of King’s “Second Emancipation Proclamation” and its continuing relevance for contemporary arguments about equality. “The [‘I Have a Dream’] speech and all that surrounds it—background and consequences—are brought magnificently to life . . . In this book he gives us drama and emotion, a powerful sense of history combined with illuminating scholarship.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

King's Dream

Professor and Chair of the English Department Eric J Sundquist

This powerful book argues that white culture in America does not exist apart from black culture. The hallmark of this volume is a sweeping reevaluation of the glory years of American literature--from 1830 to 1930--that shows how white literature and black literature form a single interwoven tradition. (Harvard Univ. Press)February

Race in the Making of American Literature

To Wake the Nations

A comprehensive survey of the most important writing to come out of the Holocaust. Writing in Witness is a broad survey of the most important writing about the Holocaust produced by eyewitnesses at the time and soon after. Whether they intended to spark resistance and undermine Nazi authority, to comfort family and community, to beseech God, or to leave a memorial record for posterity, the writers reflect on the power and limitations of the written word in the face of events often thought to be beyond representation. The diaries, journals, letters, poems, and other works were created across a geography reaching from the Baltics to the Balkans, from the Atlantic coast to the heart of the Soviet Union, and in a wide array of original languages. Along with the readings, Eric J. Sundquists introductions provide a comprehensive account of the Holocaust as a historical event. Including works by prominent authors such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel as well as those little known or anonymous, Writing in Witness provides, in vital and memorable examples, a wide-ranging account of the Holocaust by those who felt the imperative to give written testimony. Written in every European language, in every conceivable manner, and from every point on the Holocaust compassprisons, ghettos, transports, concentration and labor camps, killing fields, bunkers, makeshift shelters, camps for displaced personsthese diary entries, letters, testimonies, eyewitness accounts, poems, stories, sermons, and inscriptions demand that they be heard. Written by Jewish men, women, and children; by Christian bystanders; and yes, even by two German perpetrators, they depict the living nightmare as it unfolds. Six nightmare years and their aftermath are rendered in a language that defies the limits of language; an inescapable present that eclipses the past and cries out to an unattainable future. In the beginning was the Holocaust, and this is its story as told by its original responders.  David G. Roskies, author of Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide Writing in Witness is a devastatingly and deeply honest work of testimony by those whose worlds were shattered by the catastrophic rupture of the Holocaust. It is also, and primarily, a testament to the strength and courage of those who experienced the atrocities of Nazism and who felt compelled to write about those events in clear, unsparing language. Eric Sundquist, editor of this important collection, provides a sensitive selection of primary texts by men and women who witnessed the machinery and implementation of genocide. In his thoughtful and knowledgeable introduction, Sundquist establishes the framework for the ethical engagement of reader and eyewitness in the calculation of enormous loss. The various genres of witnessing included in this collectiondiaries, poems, memoirs, letters, recordsevoke in their clarity ancient forms of lamentation and Midrash, giving voice to memory. With judiciously interpretive preliminary material introducing each section, Sundquist lets the witnesses speak for themselves. No course on Holocaust literature or history should be without this anthology.  Victoria Aarons, editor of Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction This wide-ranging and affecting collection of firsthand accounts of the Holocaust, each expertly chosen and deftly introduced and contextualized, will be ideal for teaching purposes and indispensable to anyone intent on recovering a sense of what the horror felt like. Eric Sundquist has assembled an extraordinarily illuminating and powerful book.  Peter Hayes, Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus, Northwestern University Writing in Witness is a rich assortment of written accounts of diverse aspects of the experience of the Holocaust that are skillfully chosen and masterfully introduced and contextualized. What emerges from an overarching reading of these collective texts is a sense of how the actors who experienced or witnessed the events of the Holocaust registered them in language and through the sometimes immediate, sometimes reflective process of writing.  Erin McGlothlin, author of Second-Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration

Examines the portrayal of Blacks in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe's use of Gothic imagery, and the depiction of women's role in the slavery crisis

New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin

This is a 1993 collection of fourteen essays by America's leading historians and literary critics which evaluates the importance of Frederick Douglass in his own day and on into the twentieth century. As a result of the research and interpretation in both literary and historical studies, Frederick Douglass has assumed a central place in the revival of interest in the multicultural study of American literature. His autobiographies are fundamental case studies of the slave narratives that form the basis of African-American culture. His remarkable achievements as abolitionist orator, journalist, and writer of fiction and historical essays have made him a pivotal figure in a variety of disciplines. The essays examine Douglass' own views on gender and class, as well as racial issues, and place his thought and writings in the context of debates about slavery and freedom that dominated the intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century America.

New Literary and Historical Essays

Frederick Douglass

David Cesarani

For the last decade scholars have been questioning the idea that the Holocaust was not talked about in any way until well into the 1970s. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence is the first collection of authoritative, original scholarship to expose a serious misreading of the past on which, controversially, the claims for a ‘Holocaust industry’ rest. Taking an international approach this bold new book exposes the myth and opens the way for a sweeping reassessment of Jewish life in the postwar era, a life lived in the pervasive, shared awareness that Jews had narrowly survived a catastrophe that had engulfed humanity as a whole but claimed two-thirds of their number. The chapters include: an overview of the efforts by survivor historians and memoir writers to inform the world of the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe an evaluation of the work of survivor-historians and memoir writers new light on the Jewish historical commissions and the Jewish documentation centres studies of David Boder, a Russian born psychologist who recorded searing interviews with survivors, and the work of philosophers, social thinkers and theologians theatrical productions by survivors and the first films on the theme made in Hollywood how the Holocaust had an impact on the everyday life of Jews in the USA and a discussion of the different types, and meanings, of ‘silence’. A breakthrough volume in the debate about the ‘Myth of Silence’, this is a must for all students of Holocaust and genocide.

Challenging the Myth of Silence

After the Holocaust

The House Divided

Faulkner

The flourishing of pre-Civil War literature known as the American Renaissance occurred in a volatile context of national expansion and sectional strife. Canonical writers such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau, as well as those more recently acclaimed, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, emerged amidst literature devoted to questions of nationalism, exploration, empire, the frontier, and slavery. This outpouring included some of the most important early works in African American, American Indian, and Chicana/Chicano literature. Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865 tells the story of this exceptionally vibrant and wide-ranging multicultural "renaissance" of our national literature. Scores of diaries, reports, and memoirs, in addition to a diverse imaginative literature, documented the nation's expansion to its modern continental borders, along with exploration of territory far beyond. Driven by belief in the "manifest destiny" of Americans to bring liberty to new lands, narratives of empire ranged from the heroic to the fantastic, and they spawned a popular frontier literature that created some of the most enduring myths of America. At the same time, expansion provoked a corresponding literature of dispossession by American Indians and Mexicans that combined protest with statements of pride and independence. Accompanying expansion was the contentious and ultimately tragic debate over slavery carried out in a voluminous proslavery and antislavery literature that took the form of speeches, pamphlets, autobiography, poetry, and fiction. By juxtaposing the literature of slavery with the literatures of exploration and the frontier, Empire and Slavery traces the formative features of the national image of the United States. Eric J. Sundquist is UCLA Foundation Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction, and Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America, among other books.

Empire and Slavery in American Literature, 1820-1865

This powerful book argues that white culture in America does not exist apart from black culture. The revolution of the rights of man that established this country collided long ago with the system of slavery, and we have been trying to reestablish a steady course for ourselves ever since. To Wake the Nations is urgent and rousing: we have integrated our buses, schools, and factories, but not the canon of American literature. That is the task Eric Sundquist has assumed in a book that ranges from politics to literature, from Uncle Remus to African American spirituals. But the hallmark of this volume is a sweeping reevaluation of the glory years of American literature--from 1830 to 1930--that shows how white literature and black literature form a single interwoven tradition. By examining African America's contested relation to the intellectual and literary forms of white culture, Sundquist reconstructs the main lines of American literary tradition from the decades before the Civil War through the early twentieth century. An opening discussion of Nat Turner's "Confessions," recorded by a white man, Thomas Gray, establishes a paradigm for the complexity of meanings that Sundquist uncovers in American literary texts. Focusing on Frederick Douglass's autobiographical books, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, Martin Delany's novel Blake; or the Huts of America, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, Charles Chesnutt's fiction, and W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, Sundquist considers each text against a rich background of history, law, literature, politics, religion, folklore, music, and dance. These readings lead to insights into components of the culture at large: slavery as it intersected with postcolonial revolutionary ideology; literary representations of the legal and political foundations of segregation; and the transformation of elements of African and antebellum folk consciousness into the public forms of American literature. "Almost certainly the finest book yet written on race and American literature," writes Arnold Rampersad of Princeton University. To Wake the Nations "amounts to a startlingly penetrating commentary on American culture, a commentary that should have a powerful impact on areas far beyond the texts investigated here."

Eric J. Sundquist

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