The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2019).
Watch a book talk about The Implicated Subject (UCLA, March 5, 2020). See Michael Rothberg's conversation about The Implicated Subject with Wayne Modest from the Research Center for Material Culture (July 22, 2020).
Listen to a podcast about The Implicated Subject on Jewish History Matters (June 7, 2020).
Read a special forum on The Implicated Subject in the Journal of Perpetrator Studies (3.1; 2020).
Reviews of The Implicated Subject: "Book of the Week" in Times Higher Education (pdf); in Critical Inquiry; in the American Historical Review.
Read an essay about The Implicated Subject in the German newspaper Die Zeit.
Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Cultural Memory in the Present. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009).
"This is the first book to take up the transnational and cross-disciplinary politics of memory in ways adequate to the difficulties and pitfalls of the topic. In its readings of theoretical and literary texts primarily from the 1950s and 1960s, it confronts the Holocaust with decolonization, successfully questioning the 'color line' separating these two discourses today. Deft in argument and subtle in its analyses, Rothberg's book provides an exciting new direction for memory studies in the humanities and in social thought. A compelling read!" —Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University
Multidirectional Memory has been reviewed on H-Net and in The American Historical Review [pdf], Annales [pdf in French], Critique [pdf in French], Interventions [pdf], Journal of Jewish Identities [pdf], Modern Intellectual History [pdf], Postmodern Culture [subscription required], Textual Practice [pdf], The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory [pdf], and Témoigner: Entre Histoire et Mémoire [pdf], which also published an interview with Rothberg about the book [pdf in French; pdf in English]. A post on the German blog Erinnerungskulturen can be found here.
The book was the inspiration for a conference at the University of Leeds' Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, "Multidirectional Memory: Slavery, the Holocaust, and the Colonial Past" (September 23-24, 2010), a panel at the American Academy of Religion in November 2011, and workshops at the University of York in January 2012, at Ghent University's Centre for Literature and Trauma in March 2012, and at the University of Konstanz in May 2013. Concepts from the book have also been taken up by contemporary artists.
A French translation of Multidirectional Memory has been published by Editions Petra. A Polish translation has been published by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in their "New Humanities" series. A German translation is forthcoming from Metropol Verlag in December 2020.
"This is the first book to take up the transnational and cross-disciplinary politics of memory in ways adequate to the difficulties and pitfalls of the topic. In its readings of theoretical and literary texts primarily from the 1950s and 1960s, it confronts the Holocaust with decolonization, successfully questioning the 'color line' separating these two discourses today. Deft in argument and subtle in its analyses, Rothberg's book provides an exciting new direction for memory studies in the humanities and in social thought. A compelling read!" —Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University
Multidirectional Memory has been reviewed on H-Net and in The American Historical Review [pdf], Annales [pdf in French], Critique [pdf in French], Interventions [pdf], Journal of Jewish Identities [pdf], Modern Intellectual History [pdf], Postmodern Culture [subscription required], Textual Practice [pdf], The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory [pdf], and Témoigner: Entre Histoire et Mémoire [pdf], which also published an interview with Rothberg about the book [pdf in French; pdf in English]. A post on the German blog Erinnerungskulturen can be found here.
The book was the inspiration for a conference at the University of Leeds' Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, "Multidirectional Memory: Slavery, the Holocaust, and the Colonial Past" (September 23-24, 2010), a panel at the American Academy of Religion in November 2011, and workshops at the University of York in January 2012, at Ghent University's Centre for Literature and Trauma in March 2012, and at the University of Konstanz in May 2013. Concepts from the book have also been taken up by contemporary artists.
A French translation of Multidirectional Memory has been published by Editions Petra. A Polish translation has been published by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in their "New Humanities" series. A German translation is forthcoming from Metropol Verlag in December 2020.
Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000).
"Michael Rothberg speaks in a critical voice that is at once incisive, exploratory, capacious and generous. Ranging from the realist to the modernist to the postmodern, he devises a remarkably simple yet conceptually rich and suggestive model for the different modes of representation demanded by the Holocaust. Traumatic Realism is clear, compelling and unusually important."--Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University
Traumatic Realism has been reviewed in Ariel, Contemporary Literature, Cultural Critique, History and Theory, and elsewhere. A Chinese translation is in preparation.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Demands of Holocaust Representation
Part One: Modernism “After Auschwitz”
1. After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe
2. Before Auschwitz: Maurice Blanchot, From Now On
Part Two: Realism in “The Concentrationary Universe”
3. “The Barbed Wire of the Postwar World”: Ruth Klüger’s Traumatic Realism
4. Unbearable Witness: Charlotte Delbo’s Traumatic Timescapes
Part Three: Postmodernism, or, “The Year of the Holocaust”
5. Reading Jewish: Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, and Holocaust Postmemory
6. “Touch an Event to Begin”: Americanizing the Holocaust
Conclusion: After the “Final Solution”: From the “Jewish Question” to Jewish Questioning
"Michael Rothberg speaks in a critical voice that is at once incisive, exploratory, capacious and generous. Ranging from the realist to the modernist to the postmodern, he devises a remarkably simple yet conceptually rich and suggestive model for the different modes of representation demanded by the Holocaust. Traumatic Realism is clear, compelling and unusually important."--Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University
Traumatic Realism has been reviewed in Ariel, Contemporary Literature, Cultural Critique, History and Theory, and elsewhere. A Chinese translation is in preparation.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Demands of Holocaust Representation
Part One: Modernism “After Auschwitz”
1. After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe
2. Before Auschwitz: Maurice Blanchot, From Now On
Part Two: Realism in “The Concentrationary Universe”
3. “The Barbed Wire of the Postwar World”: Ruth Klüger’s Traumatic Realism
4. Unbearable Witness: Charlotte Delbo’s Traumatic Timescapes
Part Three: Postmodernism, or, “The Year of the Holocaust”
5. Reading Jewish: Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, and Holocaust Postmemory
6. “Touch an Event to Begin”: Americanizing the Holocaust
Conclusion: After the “Final Solution”: From the “Jewish Question” to Jewish Questioning