***VIRTUAL*** Holocaust Graphic Novels with Victoria Aarons

The early decades of the 21st century have seen a range of graphic narratives that return to the traumatic moment of the Holocaust. With memory as the controlling trope, these graphic writers and cartoonists, through the juxtaposition of text and image, extend the narrative of the Holocaust into the present, giving voice both to unrecoverable loss and to survival. As a genre of witnessing, Holocaust graphic narratives, in retracing the traumatic tracks of memory, inscribe the weight of history on generations that follow in its wake. This discussion will explore the diverse ways in which graphic novelists evoke the rupture of the Holocaust as it extends in both recollected and imagined memory over time. Victoria Aarons holds the position of Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University, San Antonio, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. In addition to more than ninety scholarly articles and book chapters, she is the author or editor of eleven books, including, most recently, "The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction; The Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow"; "Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and Fiction"; "The New Jewish American Literary Studies"; and "Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory." She is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Women in Judaism, and she is series editor for Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature.