Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-War Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts

Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of French poet, novelist and camp survivor Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His concept of a concentrationary art—the need for an urgent and constant aesthetic resistance to the continuing effects of the concentrationary universe—proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and other writers and theorists across a number of disciplines. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of Jean Cayrol’s key essays on the subject, as well as the first book-length study of how we might situate and elaborate his concept of a Lazarean aesthetic in cultural theory, literature, cinema, music and contemporary art.
Review
“Concentrationary Art is invariably intellectually exhilarating to read, and is hard to put down. It puts forward a new and cogent aesthetic theory in its analysis not only of the wartime ‘concentrationary’, but also of the role of the survivor in a post-war world where traces of the same phenomena persist unseen in the everyday.” - Sue Vice, University of Sheffield
“This is an authoritative, clear, and insightful book. The contributions to this excellent volume offer a novel take on the concentrationary and provide a wider understanding of post-Holocaust art.” - Kathryn Robson, Newcastle University
About the Author
Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. He has written on cultural memory, representations of the Holocaust, and post-colonial theory and cultures. His publications include Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (2013). He co-edited Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (2012).
Tags: Holocaust, French, History, Literary Criticism, Subjects & Themes, European, Historical Events