Metaphor and ethics in narrations on the Holocaust Literary quality regained

Abstract

Te author of the article reconstructs a discussion concerning a crisis of a „literary quality” within Shoah’s presentations. Initially, as a part of discussion, the literature of the Holocaust was getting closer to the forms connected with the document according to the plan. The theoreticians pointed to the chronicle as a form close to an ideal version which would allow for a literal presentation of facts concerning the Extermination. In the context of the argument around a figurative language, what seems interesting is Alvin H. Rosenfeld’s position expressed in A Double Dying. Reflection on Holocaust Literature. The author of a Double Dying explains why a „literary quality” becomes a desirable element in descriptions of the Extermination. He emphasizes that the poetic nature of prose and a literary „image” of the very event is most strongly retained in the memory. Polish and foreign researchers have been highlighting the importance and function of a metaphor, irony, grotesque, symbols and myths present in narrations on the Extermination, even those non-literary by nature since the turn of the 1980s and 1990s.