Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Rudolf Freiburg is Professor of English literature at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is co-editor and editor of several books, including Swift: The Enigmatic Dean (1998), “But Vindicate the Ways of God to Man”: Literature and Theodicy (2004), Kultbücher (2004), Literatur und Holocaust (2009), Träume (2015), Unendlichkeit (2016), D@tenflut (2017), Sprachwelten (2018) and Täuschungen (2019). He has written many articles on eighteenth-century literature (Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson), and contemporary literature (John Fowles, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Sebastian Barry).Gerd Bayer is Professor of English literature and culture at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He has published on contemporary and early modern literature, including Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2015) and on Holocaustliterature and film, most recently as guest editor of a special issue for Holocaust Studies (UK).

• 1. Survival: An Introductory Essay.- Part I. Survival and the Group.- 2. The Visibility of Survival: Even the Dogs and Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Attention.- 3. “Survivors all”: Affirmative Connections in Novels by Julian Barnes and Caryl Phillips.- 4. Feats of Survival: Refugee Writing and the Ethics of Representation.- 5. Surviving Trauma in the Female Neo-slave Narrative: Sara Collins’s Neo-gothic The Confessions of Frannie Langton.- Part II. Survival and the Individual.- 6. “That was what all men became: techniques for survival”: The Paradoxical Notion of Survival in Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time.- 7. Vulnerability, Empathy, and the Ethics of Survival in Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here.- 8. Stories of Dis-ease: Ethics and Survival in Dementia Narratives.- 9. Surviving: Jenny Diski, Illness, and Gratitude.- 10. Environmental Ethics of Survival: Case Study Analysis of I am Legend and The Revenant.- Part III Survival and the Holocaust.- 11. Close Reading of a Title: On Survival in Auschwitz.- 12. Narrative Closure and the “Whew” Effect: The Ethics of Reading Narratives of Survival of the Holocaust.- 13. With All the Force of Literalness: Ruth Klüger’s Survivor Testimonies in Erwin Leiser’s We Were Ten Brothers and Thomas Mitscherlich’s Journeys into Life.- 14. “The Four Brothers”: Claude Lanzmann’s War Refugee Board Interviews.