Citation:
Abstract:
Focusing on the representation or presence of shoes in several literary texts and war memorials as metonymies of the Holocaust, this article will rely on Jean-François Lyotard’s call for (impossible yet necessary) linkages “after Auschwitz” to make connections between these various textual and museological scenes. As a point of departure, I revisit Jacques Derrida’s notion of “restitution” in his critique of the debate between Martin Heidegger and art critic Meyer Schapiro on the origin of a pair of shoes in van Gogh’s eponymous painting. While being sensitive to Derrida’s economic argument in The Truth in Painting, I attempt to make a case for the necessity of rehabilitating “restitution” in works of representation and commemoration, across literature, visual arts, memorials and museums.
May 2019: Arleen Ionescu is Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her major research and teaching interests are in the fields of 20th-century fiction, especially Modernist prose, as well as Critical Theory, Holocaust Studies, Translation Studies and, increasingly, Memory and Trauma Studies. She has published widely on James Joyce and other related aspects of modernism, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida in James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies Annual, Parallax, Partial Answers, and Scientia Traductionis. She is co-general editor for Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. Her books include Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality (Peter Lang, 2014) and The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is currently working on a book (co-edited with Maria Margaroni) entitled Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma (forthcoming with Rowman and Littlefield in 2020).