| abstract |
The fundamental relationship between humans and objects is at the heart of this artifactual inquiry, which spans historical, literary, museum, and pedagogical studies. There has been a growing focus on the value of objects, and particularly on the mundane, in diverse scholarly fields, such as intergenerational memory, mass trauma, artifactual literacies, and exhibition curation. This creative dissertation is an exploration and exemplification of the emotive, expressive, and expansive nature of evocative objects within these disciplines and our individual and collective identities. Part memoir, part historization, and part pedagogy, it affirms objects' indispensable roles as companions to our lives and the cornerstone of our shared humanity.
Objects as bearers of witness and agents of empathetic connection abound Holocaust scholarship and literature and have protagonistic qualities to vivify and humanize the past, educate the present, and inform the future. Using the Holocaust as its primary historical lens, this multimodal composition questions and illustrates how meaning and memory are contained within objects, what stories objects tell, how they are transmitted, and why they are important. It amalgamates first- and third-person points of view and bends traditional scholarship and pedagogy by fusing personal narrative with academic writing, embedding objects as complementary texts to be read, interrogated, and interpreted. Drawing upon the burgeoning body of post-Holocaust memoirs, anecdotal and empirical evidence, and increased attention to the concrete in scholarly and quotidian communities, it concludes that objects make us human, and we become more human by engaging with them.
|
