History Unlimited: Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture

Claudio Fogu
French and Italian Studies
UC Santa Barbara

Twenty years ago Saul Friedländer asked a number of historians and theorists to reflect on whether or not the Holocaust-as-event posed epistemological, ethical, or aesthetic limits to its representation in fiction and non-fiction. The resulting volume, Probing the Limits of Representation (1992), had an impact far beyond the circle of Holocaust scholars. Central to the conference was the representation and the ethics of Holocaust culture in a manner appropriate to the current scholarly-cultural moment focusing on questions of how the humanities rotate around the globalization and digitalization of knowledge. Held at UCLA, this conference involved a series of dialogues involving scholars in the fields of Holocaust history, film and media studies, architecture, geography, and literary studies.