Contrasting two survival literatures: On the jewish holocaust and the Chinese cultural revolution

Abstract

Both the Jewish Holocaust literature and the Chinese Cultural Revolution literature are survival literatures that came into being as a result of great disasters. But the literary interpretations of these catastrophes are widely different, shaping the respective racial memory of past suffering. This article explores the dichotomies in three ways: the influence of social context, resulting in metaphysical and political obscurities respectively: revisionism in terms of imaginative and political exploitations of human miseries; the influence of tradition, which posits that the Jewish heritage of suffering and the Chinese heritage of harmony partly account for the disparate perceptions of the tragedies. © 1987 Pergamon Journals Ltd.