Of Mirrors and Medusa: Reflections on Literary Representation after the Holocaust

This article argues that writers and critics frequently deploy the mythological story of Perseus’s slaying of Medusa to address the literary representation of the Holocaust and other traumatic events surrounding the Second World War, because the story is a complex of images relating concepts of experience, understanding, representation, and trauma. It examines how three writers, Siegfried Kracauer, Peter Weiss, and W. G. Sebald, use the story to articulate distinct answers to a key question for literature that addresses these events: How can literary representation contribute to our understanding of traumatic events when there are aspects of that understanding which experience cannot serve to confirm or deny? The article thus illuminates changing ideas about art and literature’s response to the Holocaust and other traumatic events, including how these ideas continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.