Anti-Fascist Art: Medium, Transmission, Representability

Degree Year

2026

Document Type

Thesis - Oberlin Community Only

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Comparative Literature

Advisor(s)

Claire Solomon
Jessica Resvick

Committee Member(s)

Claire Solomon
Jessica Resvick
Sebastiaan Faber

Abstract

In my Honors thesis research, I use a comparative approach to study a range of literary and artistic works made in response to fascist regimes and movements, asking how these works might move beyond declared ideological content to work against the grain of fascism on a deeper, more formal level: the ways that works militate against the believability of fascist historical narratives, political promises, and aesthetic predilections. Following Robert Paxton’s example of comparative study of fascism in The Anatomy of Fascism, my approach is concerned less with defining what is or is not “anti-fascist” than with looking at how some works present alternative modes of history, narrative, and aesthetics in opposition to the animating features of fascism. What might these ways of reading be able to illuminate about political dynamics, aesthetics, and processes of meaning-making? In particular, I focus on questions of how anti-fascist artistic and literary works use their media in inventive and challenging ways, how the transmission of stories across different times and contexts figures in these works, and fundamental questions of representability arising around both unspeakable violence and the imagination of a possible future that is different and better than the world we live in now. The works through which I explore these issues include Bertolt Brecht’s play Fear and Misery of the Third Reich and Tony Kushner’s play A Bright Room Called Day, Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus, and Paul Celan’s late poetics as seen in his collection Atemwende (Breathturn).

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