Robert Eaglestone argues that postmodernism is a response to the Holocaust. He offers a range of new perspectives, including new ways of looking at testimony and at recent Holocaust fiction; explores controversies in Holocaust history; looks at the importance of the Holocaust for recent philosophy; and asks what the Holocaust means for reason, ethics, and for being human.

• Reading and the Holocaust


• 1: 'Not read and consumed in the same way as other books': Identification and the Genre of Testimony


• 2: Traces of Experience: The Texts of Testimony


• 3: 'Faithful and doubtful, near and far': Memory, Postmemory, and Identity


• 4: Holocaust Reading: Memory and Identification in Holocaust Fiction 1990-2003


• Holocaust Metahistories


• 5: Against Historicism: History, Memory, and Truth


• 6: 'Are Footnotes Less Barbaric?': History, Memory, and the Truth of the Holocaust in the Work of Saul Friedländer


• 7: ' What Constitutes a Historical Explanation?': Metahistory and the Limits of Historical Explanation in the Goldhagen/Browning Controversy


• 8: The Metahistory of Denial: The Irving/Lipstadt Libel Case and Holocaust Denial


• The Trace of the Holocaust


• 9: Inexhaustible Meaning, Inextinguishable Voices: Levinas and the Holocaust


• 10: Cinders of Philosophy, Philosophy of Cinders: Derrida and the Trace of the Holocaust


• 11: The Limits of Understanding: Perpetrator Philosophy and Philosophical Histories


• 12: The Postmodern, the Holocaust, and the Limits of the Human