Corey L Twitchell

Corey L. Twitchell, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis
Associate Professor of German & Holocaust Studies at Southern Utah University
My primary research areas are German Jewish literature and Holocaust literature and film.  My current book project, "The Ethics of Narrative Causality in Edgar Hilsenrath's Disfigured Holocaust Fiction" examines the imaginative fiction of German Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath. A crucial, and to a large degree unconventional, aspect of Hilsenrath’s fiction about the Holocaust is his unabashed exploration in narrative of the consciousness not only of Holocaust victims but also of perpetrators. The first-person narrators in his works, which include perpetrators and other morally compromised figures, address the reader directly, as a way of contextualizing and justifying their often ethically murky actions. Hilsenrath’s narratives unsettle what we as readers have generally come to expect from Holocaust literature, i.e. stories of hope and personal redemption, provoking us to re-think the mechanics by which historical violence operates and the effects it has on the people who, on the one hand, experience and, on the other hand, commit this violence. Post-Holocaust German Jewish fiction often employs complex narrative strategies through the text performs the often unfulfilled search for an interlocutor willing to listen to stories of Jewish suffering. Edgar Hilsenrath, while in many ways unique for his particular brand of unvarnished Holocaust representation, arguably engages in a larger cultural conversation about textual ethics with other German Jewish writers and thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Jurek Becker, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Ruth Klüger, Jakov Lind, and Fred Wander.

In addition to research informed by both German studies and Holocaust studies, my teaching interests include postwar and contemporary German and Austrian literature, Jewish studies, narrative theory, German modernism, and Kafka. Courses I have taught include: 20th-Century German Literature, Contemporary German Literature and Culture, German Jewish Literature Before and After the Rise of Nazism, Yiddish Literature in English Translation, Kafka’s Critters & Creatures (Kafka and the Graphic Novel), and German Cinema and Film History.
Phone: (314) 578-8619
Address: Southern Utah University
Department of Languages & Philosophy
GC 108D
351 W. University Boulevard
Cedar City, UT 84720