Extending the Conversation: The Ethics of Teaching Disturbing Pasts: Reader Response, Historical Contextualization, and Rhetorical (Con)Textualization of Holocaust Texts in English

A set of especially complicated ethical relationships becomes visible in literary study when the unspeakable atrocity of state-sponsored genocide is part of the story, as it is in many wartime texts taught in secondary English classrooms. What then is the nature of an English teacher’s obligation to the detailed particularity of the past and to those who endured that past whenencouraging students’ individual and collaborative responses to texts in the present (or in the future)? I explore the broad ethical question by discussing specific difficulties presented by the case of Holocaust pedagogy. The guiding purpose of the discussion is to explore a set of more general questions about the ethical dimensions of literary engagement in English—and specifically engagement with texts about disturbing pasts.