“Perhaps Redeemed”: Literature, the Holocaust, and the Survivor’s Need for a Radical Humanism with Kitty Millet

Online event. Register here to receive the Zoom link.

Kitty Millet’s presentation examines authors studied in the Holocaust and Literature course (JS 437/CWL 437/ENGL 533)—Ruth Klüger, Imre Kertesz, Primo Levi, Jean Améry, and Charlotte Delbo—to trace a “radical humanism” that emerges in literature when survivors act as the subjects of their own narratives.

Kitty Millet is Professor of Comparative Jewish Literatures and Holocaust Studies and Chair of the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She is also chairperson of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) research committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature. Millet is the author of Fault Lines of Modernity: The Fractures and Repairs of Religion, Ethics and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust: A Comparative History of Persecution (Bloomsbury, 2017). She is currently working on a book titled Kabbalah and Literature, to be published by Bloomsbury in late 2021. It includes an array of Jewish writers worldwide, such as the Safed Kabbalist Isaac Luria; Central Europeans Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Walter Benjamin; Americans Marge Piercy and Cynthia Ozick; Brazilian Clarice Lispector; and Israeli Meir Shalev. It will be the first volume in Bloomsbury’s series on comparative Jewish literatures, for which Millet is editor in chief.

Free and open to the public.

The Department of Jewish Studies welcomes persons with disabilities and will provide reasonable accommodations upon request. If you would like reasonable accommodations for this event, such as real-time captioning, please contact Rachel Gross at rbgross@sfsu.edu as soon as possible so your request may be reviewed.