by way of Ernst van Alphen Stanford.

by way of Ernst van Alphen Stanford, CA: Stanford University Pres 1997 233 pp/$4950 (hb)

The nature of history, the practice of historicization and the processe of memory dumfound special problems for postmodern musing While postmodern and poststructuralist study have often been simply characterized as negating history, they can actually be seen as in a high degree engaged with the question of to what degree to understand our relationship to the past. Particularly central to late twentieth-century fancy are the questions of in what manner we remember and what is restoreed as history amid an understanding of the part played by the image in mediating memory and history. Documentary photographs, family photographs, television and film images and the personal expression inherent in painting, photography and installation are forms between the walls of which we mediate our histories, one as well as the other personal and cultural.

If modernism believed the image of the past to be a trace of reality, a form between the sides of which the past could be reexperienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no similar easy reverie. The relationship of images to the past has become problematic and the part of the image in producing memory and allowing for forgetting is central to this shift. The origin of this change toward an ironic view of the past and its representations can be seen to have been given its greatest in quantity symptomatic invocation in two primary texts: Theodor Adorno's famous statement that "To write verse after Auschwitz is barbaric"(l) and Roland Barthes's analysis of the image in Camera Lucida as the pair shock and death, in which he asks "Is History not simply that time when we were not born?"(2) Adorno's statement, with its implication that the horror of the Holocaust made aesthetic representation greatly problematic, has haunted theoretical work about the conflict of memory and history and of fact and fiction in relationship to the Holocaust. Barthes influenced a broad range of work in succession the role of the photograph in depicting and producing the past as a means to deconstruct identity and as counter-memory.

Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Andrea Liss's Trespassing by the and of Shadows: Memory, Photography & the Holocaust and Ernst van Alphen's Caught by the agency of History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory each propose complex and useful new ways to understand our desire for and mediation of memory and history. Indeed, all three authors arrive at the conclusion that traditional forms of history will not provide an understanding of the past. Instead, they embrace nontraditional, formerly delegitimated forms in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as autobiography, visual arts, personal and family photographs and historical comic main division s as means to examine past experiences and retell history. While Liss and van Alphen examine the relationship of the documentary and the artistic, or to use van Alphen's word the "imaginary," specifically relating to the Holocaust, Hirsch is troubleed with the role of family pictures in the construction of individual and familial identity and as a means by the agency of which the past, including the traumatic incidents of the Holocaust, is negotiated, framed and reframed.

Hirsch uses the limit "postmemory" as a means to understand the complexities not simply of the memories of the children of survivors, unless the process of cultural memory itself. She argues that postmemory is related to issues of the diaspora and temporal and spatial exile; it is an essential means to understanding memory precisely because it is

distinguished from memory according to generational distance and from history from deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and highly particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its motive or source is mediated not within recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. . . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who swell up dominated by narratives that preced their birth, whose allow belated stories are evacuated through the stories of the previous generation shaped by means of traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.

Postmemory is about the continuation of memory and its regeneration in those for whom memories are experienced one time or twice removed. Liss, who also occupys the term, uses it to ascribe to "the artists' distance from the incidents as well as their relation to the fallout of the experiences." It could be said that these authors papal court artistic engagements of postmemory as offering compelling means to reexamine not single the ways in which the past is understood, give an account ofed and mediated, but to reconsider the past itself.

While the question of the incommunicability of recent experience and representation was repeatedly posed by modernism, albeit with the assumption that so communication and representation were still possible goals, the Holocaust as an circumstance forced a dramatic shift in notions of what is representable and communicable. Walter Benjamin wrote mournfully of the tenors of the mechanical terror of World War I upon the capacity to tell stories or to contribute an experience communicable precisely because of the vivid change that war caused in the European experience of modernity - from united of optimism to one of terror and destruction.(3) besides it is the Holocaust that has been largely understood in western imagination as the primary event for which representation is always inadequate or impossible. This has been debated extensively, in particular its relationship to other traumatic ends and genocides of the twentieth hundred yet it seems clear that the horror of this result with its industrialization of death, marks a shift in the Euro-American world view, united that can be characterized as a questioning of modernist doctrines precisely because of the inconceivable nature of its death and destruction. Hence the Holocaust has been seen as a topic too volatile, too sacred and too unimaginable, its representations subdue to stringent moral codes. to what extent then can we interpret the immense outpouring of works in literature, art and popular improvement that have attempted to make perception of this event, of the brutality, the obliteration of whole communities, the bureaucratization of death and the capacity to survive? by what means can we deal with Adorno's statement that after Auschwitz it is barbaric to continue writing poetry? single could read it as profoundly disabling in that it assigns all attempts at interpretation of the Holocaust as suspicious. still one can also see in what way this statement forced an examination of the question of representation in general and helped lead to a inquiry for new, non-modernist forms of engagement with history and memory.