Sara Guyer. Romanticism After Auschwitz (Book Review‪)‬

Sara Guyer. Romanticism after Auschwitz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. 364. $55.00. There was a time when theoretical debates in the province of romantic studies reverberated throughout the domain of literary studies. That time now lies decidedly behind us, and the academic study of literature and culture has since pursued a variety of very different projects. Romanticism after Auschwitz is admirably underwhelmed by this divergence of agendas, as it resolutely revisits the once-ubiquitous work of M. H. Abrams, Geoffrey Hartman, and especially Paul de Man in order to retrieve their theoretical insights for current ethical and theoretical debates. The book unearths what it calls "a resistant, nonredemptive strain within romanticism" (18). Such a minor, unheroic romanticism not only allows the book to intervene in contemporary critical debates, it is also the theme that connects the book's intensely focused discussions of a number of very different texts: there are chapters devoted to English romantic literature (Frankenstein, the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, and Wordsworth's sonnets "To Sleep"), but also to texts from different genres (there is a chapter on Robert Antelme's Holocaust-memoir L'Espece humaine), different languages (Paul Celan's German translation of Shakespeare's sonnet 71), and even different media (the last chapter deals with Alain Resnais' film Nuit et brouillard, and with Paul Celan's translation of it).