SOURCES AND TRENDS OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH

The course consists of a critical excursus on the concepts of History, Memory, witness with particular regard to the transformation, over the last thirty years, of the public discourse on the Shoah and the affirmation also of a memorial, emotional story based on the centrality of the trauma and the eyewitness opposed to the classic vision of a story based on written sources and intended as progressive liberation, a vision that entered into crisis during the second half of the twentieth century, with the crisis itself of the concept of modernity. In this context the public perception of the Holocaust has been transformed, also through non-historiographical narratives (diaries and memoirs, interviews, documentaries, fiction, memorial days, museums and memorials) from war crime to universal sacralized trauma. The aim of the course is to reconstruct the reasons and modalities of this transformation.