“In Search of Etty Hillesum”: A Section from The Adorno Elegies

The Department of English presents

“In Search of Etty Hillesum”: A Section from The Adorno Elegies
by Michael Trussler
University of Regina

Friday, April 4, 2014
3:30 pm
Arts 217

Part of a book-length manuscript entitled The Adorno Elegies – a combination of poetry and mini-essays about painting, the natural world, and the Holocaust – this paper is a response to the diary and letters of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jewish woman living in Amsterdam during the 1940s, who then perished in Auschwitz in 1943. Hillesum’s work is one of the primary sources that details Jewish experience in Holland under Nazi occupation; further, it explicitly explores the relationship between aesthetic form and ethical responsibility regarding the artistic treatment of suffering. Dr. Trussler’s piece highlights photography as a discourse that complicates socially-sanctioned memorial sites while simultaneously embodying the hermeneutic dilemma of viewing the Holocaust from the twenty-first century.

All are welcome

For more information contact: Lindsey Banco
lindsey.banco@usask.ca