Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (The Modern Jewish Experience) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253007399 ISBN 13: 9780253007391

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2012

Synopsis

As millions of people around the world who have read her diary attest, Anne Frank, the most familiar victim of the Holocaust, has a remarkable place in contemporary memory. Anne Frank Unbound looks beyond this young girl’s words at the numerous ways people have engaged her life and writing. Apart from officially sanctioned works and organizations, there exists a prodigious amount of cultural production, which encompasses literature, art, music, film, television, blogs, pedagogy, scholarship, religious ritual, and comedy. Created by both artists and amateurs, these responses to Anne Frank range from veneration to irreverence. Although at times they challenge conventional perceptions of her significance, these works testify to the power of Anne Frank, the writer, and Anne Frank, the cultural phenomenon, as people worldwide forge their own connections with the diary and its author.

About this title

About the Author:

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is University Professor of Performance Studies and Affiliated Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Her books include (with Mayer Kirshenblatt) They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust and The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times. She currently leads the exhibition development team for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Jeffrey Shandler is Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He is author of Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture and While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust, and editor (with Hasia R. Diner and Beth S. Wenger) of Remembering the Lower East Side (IUP, 2000).

Review:

A brilliantly conceived and long overdue opening up [or deconstruction] of the Anne Frank story. (James Clifford Professor Emeritus, History of Consciousness Department
University of California, Santa Cruz)

These essays provide fresh takes on Anne Frank, her diary, and historical magnitude. The volume leaves the reader in a new place of discovery and awareness. (Shelley Hornstein coeditor of Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust (IUP, 2002).)

This collection of brilliant essays offers fascinating and unexpected insights into the significance of Anne Frank’s iconic Holocaust-era diary from many disciplinary perspectives in the arts and humanities. (Jan T. Gross Princeton University)

This astute collection of essays unpacks the complexity of Anne Frank as the source of numerous editions, artworks, musical compositions, plays, films, novels, souvenirs, memorials, museums, and so on. It is a superb pedagogical tool for examining the particular impact of Anne Frank’s story as well as the larger issue of how cultural icons are constructed, circulate, and inspire engagement. (Marita Sturken New York University)

In their highly readable, illuminating essays, a cutting-edge cast of scholars explores the Anne Frank Phenomenon--the myriad mediations that one little plaid notebook has inspired over the last seven decades. . . . Rich and penetrating, Anne Frank Unbound brings into focus the world's ongoing engagement with a girl who has been constantly reinvented as paradigm, paragon, and even parody. (Alisa Solomon Columbia University)

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0253007399
• ISBN 13: 9780253007391
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448
• Editor: Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Barbara, Shandler Jeffrey