either a radical and liberating movement or as a mere symptom of late capitalism and a media-saturated culture in which the medium is the message. Students will study some of the key theoretical documents on the postmodern, including extracts from the work of Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard.

In the immediate aftermath of the cataclysmic events of the Shoah, the philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno interrogated the meaning of 'culture' after the failure of culture. In contemporary discourse, the Shoah has long since been turned into a marketable icon of suffering. Indeed, the encroachment on the victims' memory of what has contentiously been called the 'Holocaust industry or, with a gruesome pun, Shoah business, is frequently perceived as threatening to pervert remembrance of this singular eventin history. Ever since Adornos often quoted and frequently misunderstood dictum that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz (1949), a discussion about the value and the significance of the representation of the Shoah in cultural production has been engaged in. Many of the concerns focused on in this debate remain controversial, among them the questions of the memory of the Shoah and its medial representations, and of the potentially therapeutic value of confronting the emotional trauma of genocide in cultural production.

In this module, students will enter into these debates by enquiring into the ability of narrative, in literature, film and other forms of memorialisation, to represent the unrepresentable, by exploring the use of these narratives as history, and by investigating the so-called Americanisation of the Shoah.