The Texture of Memory in Holocaust Graphic Narratives

Prof. Victoria Aarons illuminates how comics and graphic novels give visual form to Holocaust memory (JAHLit Keynote / Ratner Lecture)

How do you draw what can barely be spoken? In recent decades, a remarkable wave of Holocaust graphic narratives has emerged, and its artists use the language of comics to bring the spaces of traumatic memory to life. Panels, silences, and gutters become “memoryscapes,” visual landscapes where the past erupts into the present on the page. They make absence visible and give shape to the gaps and ellipses of memory.

As the keynote lecturer of the annual Jewish American & Holocaust Literature (JAHLit) Symposium, Professor Aarons will take us through child survivor narratives and the graphic novels of second- and third-generation artists. In conversation, these works form a montage of voices and perspectives on the Shoah. Each gives shape and texture to witnessing, memory, and testimony, as an elegiac response to loss and as a testament to resilience and survival.

Prof. Victoria Aarons is Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. She is author or editor of 14 books, including Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory; Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women’s Graphic Narratives; and The Story’s Not Over: Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives. She is a judge for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and series editor for Bloomsbury Studies in Jewish Literature.

Free and open to the public. Registration is required.

This event is co-presented by Tulane’s Department of Jewish Studies and the Stuart & Suzanne Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience. It functions as the Grant Center's annual Audrey G. Ratner Lecture, as well as the keynote lecture of the JAHLit Symposium.