Library Fun!

So I thought in the broadest sense my work was about how history is presented in “new media” (eg. blogs, social networking, websites in general). So I did some internet searching for academic essays on the subject and luckily stumbled across this website (http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/) which is from the George Mason University website. It has a series of essays written by academics which deal with the representation of history in new media.

Me and Alice went to the library today, as seen here:

And here:

I read (and borrowed) a really great book while I was there, it was called Is History Fiction? by Ann Curthoys and John Docker. It had a whole section on Holocaust denial using the Lipstadt and Irving trial as a primary example. Curthoys and Docker argued that, “For many opponents of postmodernism, Holocaust denial had for some time seemed to be the ultimate test and disproof of postmodernist ideas about history. The charge was not that postmodernists themselves denied the Holocaust, but they had removed the ground for proving the denialists wrong. As Deborah Lipstadt put it, deconstructionists had ‘created an atmosphere of permissiveness towards questioning the meaning of historical events and made it hard for it proponents to assert there was anything “off limits” for this skeptical approach.’ ” (pg 212) This obviously links closely to the work we did on Derrida’s idea that “truth is plural”, that there is as many different readings of a text as there are readers. In short, it was the work of poststructuralist theorists like Derrida that opened the door to Holocaust deniers like David Irving.

The above paragraph is, admittedly, quite general, but I think I point that slotted almost too perfectly into the course to be forgotten. In fact, I found this whole topic, being the link between postmodernism and the denying of the Holocaust, to be really interesting, maybe I should of focused on this instead? Then again, perhaps too broad.