Melanie Dilly, a PhD student in German and Comparative Literature, has won the 2015 Sylvia Naish Lecture Competition and will deliver her lecture entitled ‘One Eye is Not Enough: Stereoscopic Writing after WWII’ on 19 March 2015 at the Institute of Modern Languages Research.
The Sylvia Naish Lectures were launched in memory of Sylvia Naish, an accomplished linguist, translator, Friend of Germanic Studies,and benefactor of the former Institute of Germanic Studies. Research students in the field of Germanic studies at universities across the UK are invited to submit proposals for this annual lecture. The winning entry carries a prize of £100. The lecture is also published in abridged form in the next issue of the newsletter of the Friends of Germanic Studies.
In her lecture Melanie will argue that, owing to the rapidly increasing lack of first-hand witnesses, alternative paths for accessing memories of the Holocaust have to be found. These new paths are primarily defined by distance, understood in temporal, spatial and cultural terms.
While distance might at first seem a counterintuitive model for coming to terms with the past, the example of the writer in exile, such as the author Salman Rushdie, suggests that it already exists in spatial terms. Rushdie presents his concept of ‘stereoscopic vision’ as a double perspective resulting from geographical distance from the writer’s home. This assumption can equally be applied to temporal distance, with the consequence that contemporary resonance comes to replace the dominant narrative of the reality of the past. Literature tries less to remember a past reality than to shape present perceptions of it. This leads directly to the third kind of distance: cultural distance. Although in the immediate post-war years the Holocaust was untouchable in the sense that one was not allowed to compare it to other traumatic events in history, the notion of ‘transnational Holocaust memory’ is slowly becoming in vogue.
Full details of Melanie’s lecture can be found here: http://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/about-us/news/2015-sylvia-naish-lecture-competition-winner