Alan Itkin
Biographic Data
| ID | 4246244 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alan Itkin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alan |
| FAMILY NAME | Itkin |
| SIGNATURE | ITKIN A |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 7 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Of Mirrors and Medusa: Reflections on Literary Representation after the Holocaust
This article argues that writers and critics frequently deploy the mythological story of Perseus’s slaying of Medusa to address the literary representation of the Holocaust and other traumatic events surrounding the Second World War, because the story is a complex of images relating concepts of experience, understanding, representation, and trauma. It examines how three writers, Siegfried Kracauer, Peter Weiss, and W. G. Sebald, use the story to …
Vergegenwärtigung der Vergangenheit. Geschichtsbilder in W.G. Sebalds Prosa. Von Jon Gestermann. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2020. 296 Seiten. €40,00 broschiert oder eBook
Kafka's Worlds
Scholars of Franz Kafka's literary works, going back to Walter Benjamin, have often claimed that these works resist or call into question critics' attempts to produce definitive interpretations of them. Taking this point to heart, this essay argues for an approach to Kafka's works that does not seek to decode hidden messages in them through critical interpretation, but rather views them as experiments in world building and attempts to analyze the…
Restaging “Degenerate Art”: The Politics of Memory in the Berlin Sculpture Find Exhibit
In January of 2010, excavations near the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin yielded a surprising discovery: workers unearthed a cache of sculptures stored in a forgotten depot of the Nazi Reichspropagandaministerium. Although these sculptures, damaged during the aerial bombardment of Berlin, recalled ancient artifacts, they were actually among those works of modern art censored as “degenerate art” by the Nazis. In this article, I examine the subsequent exhi…
Against the Natural Consciousness of Time: Trauma and Ethics in Jean Améry's Beyond Guilt and Atonement
This essay argues that Jean Améry's essay collection, Beyond Guilt and Atonement (1965), must be read as an ethical expansion of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Although Améry explicitly rejects the role of traumatized victim, his consideration of the possibility of ethical thought after the crimes of National Socialism is deeply informed by Freud's trauma theory. Freud describes the trauma as a wound that cannot heal because it has never …
Introduction: The Untimely Jean Améry
This special section of The Germanic Review is inspired by two panels on Jean Amery in the fall of 2012, one at the German Studies Association Conference in Milwaukee and one at New York University
Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus: Reflection and Representation in Siegfried Kracauer's Underworlds of History
This article argues that Siegfried Kracauer's History: The Last Things Before the Last articulates new modes of historical thought and historical representation that respond to the challenge to traditional ways of thinking about and representing history embodied by the Holocaust. The mode of historical thought Kracauer articulates, modeled on Orpheus’ underworld journey, envisions the past as a visual space through which the historian wanders, en…
Against the Natural Consciousness of Time: Trauma and Ethics in Jean Améry's Beyond Guilt and Atonement
This essay argues that Jean Améry's essay collection, Beyond Guilt and Atonement (1965), must be read as an ethical expansion of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Although Améry explicitly rejects the role of traumatized victim, his consideration of the possibility of ethical thought after the crimes of National Socialism is deeply informed by Freud's trauma theory. Freud describes the trauma as a wound that cannot heal because it has never …
Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus: Reflection and Representation in Siegfried Kracauer's Underworlds of History
This article argues that Siegfried Kracauer's History: The Last Things Before the Last articulates new modes of historical thought and historical representation that respond to the challenge to traditional ways of thinking about and representing history embodied by the Holocaust. The mode of historical thought Kracauer articulates, modeled on Orpheus’ underworld journey, envisions the past as a visual space through which the historian wanders, en…
Orpheus, Perseus, Ahasuerus: Reflection and Representation in Siegfried Kracauer's Underworlds of History
This article argues that Siegfried Kracauer's History: The Last Things Before the Last articulates new modes of historical thought and historical representation that respond to the challenge to traditional ways of thinking about and representing history embodied by the Holocaust. The mode of historical thought Kracauer articulates, modeled on Orpheus’ underworld journey, envisions the past as a visual space through which the historian wanders, en…
Restaging “Degenerate Art”: The Politics of Memory in the Berlin Sculpture Find Exhibit
In January of 2010, excavations near the Rotes Rathaus in Berlin yielded a surprising discovery: workers unearthed a cache of sculptures stored in a forgotten depot of the Nazi Reichspropagandaministerium. Although these sculptures, damaged during the aerial bombardment of Berlin, recalled ancient artifacts, they were actually among those works of modern art censored as “degenerate art” by the Nazis. In this article, I examine the subsequent exhi…
Against the Natural Consciousness of Time: Trauma and Ethics in Jean Améry's Beyond Guilt and Atonement
This essay argues that Jean Améry's essay collection, Beyond Guilt and Atonement (1965), must be read as an ethical expansion of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Although Améry explicitly rejects the role of traumatized victim, his consideration of the possibility of ethical thought after the crimes of National Socialism is deeply informed by Freud's trauma theory. Freud describes the trauma as a wound that cannot heal because it has never …
Introduction: The Untimely Jean Améry
This special section of The Germanic Review is inspired by two panels on Jean Amery in the fall of 2012, one at the German Studies Association Conference in Milwaukee and one at New York University
Vergegenwärtigung der Vergangenheit. Geschichtsbilder in W.G. Sebalds Prosa. Von Jon Gestermann. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2020. 296 Seiten. €40,00 broschiert oder eBook
Kafka's Worlds
Scholars of Franz Kafka's literary works, going back to Walter Benjamin, have often claimed that these works resist or call into question critics' attempts to produce definitive interpretations of them. Taking this point to heart, this essay argues for an approach to Kafka's works that does not seek to decode hidden messages in them through critical interpretation, but rather views them as experiments in world building and attempts to analyze the…
Of Mirrors and Medusa: Reflections on Literary Representation after the Holocaust
This article argues that writers and critics frequently deploy the mythological story of Perseus’s slaying of Medusa to address the literary representation of the Holocaust and other traumatic events surrounding the Second World War, because the story is a complex of images relating concepts of experience, understanding, representation, and trauma. It examines how three writers, Siegfried Kracauer, Peter Weiss, and W. G. Sebald, use the story to …
Art (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Art history (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · History (3 works) · Literature and Cultural Memory (3 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · Computer Science (2 works) · German History and Society (2 works)