The Department of Comparative Literature is delighted to announce that Joanne Pettitt has been awarded a PhD in Comparative Literature under the supervision of Dr Axel Stähler, with a thesis entitled ‘”What Kind of Animal is the Nazi Beast?”: Representations of Perpetrators in Narratives of the Holocaust’.
Her thesis explores representations of Holocaust perpetrators in literature. Such texts, often rather controversially, seek to undo the myth of ‘pure evil’ that surrounds the Holocaust and to reconstruct the perpetrator in more ‘human’ terms. Accordingly, significant questions of ‘how’ and ‘why’ are centralised and explored, providing fertile ground for examinations of the intersections between ethics, literature and history, and enabling ongoing discussions about the characteristics and obligations of perpetrator literature as a whole.
These humanising discourses place emphasis on the contextual or situational factors that led up to the genocide. Following these issues through to their logical conclusion, this project takes the question of determinism seriously. This is not to suggest that it disavows individual responsibility, merely that it engages fully with the philosophical problems that are invoked through allusions to external influences, especially as they relate to ideas of contingency.
A significant consequence of these discussions is the impact that they have on the reader. That is because, since situational aspects are featured so heavily in these narratives, the question is raised about his or her own capacity for wrongdoing. Consequently, the reader is drawn into the narrative as a potential perpetrator. The tensions that this creates constitutes the second major focus of the thesis. It exposes the challenges that face the reader when they encounter perpetrator narratives, and the ways in which these tensions impact upon our understandings of these figures, and of the Holocaust more generally.
The thesis made use of a large number (in excess of 60) primary sources, examining both fictional and non-fictional accounts to trace paradigms across the full spectrum of perpetrator literature and contributes to the growing body of literature that engages with this topic.
Our congratulations to Dr Pettitt.
For more details of research programmes in Comparative Literature see: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/complit/postgraduate/index.html