Of Mirrors and Medusa: Reflections on Literary Representation after the Holocaust.

This article examines how the myth of Perseus's slaying of Medusa is employed by writers and critics—specifically Siegfried Kracauer, Peter Weiss, and W. G. Sebald—to explore the challenges of representing the Holocaust and other traumatic events of the Second World War in literature. It argues that the Perseus and Medusa story, with its complex imagery of experience, understanding, and trauma, serves as a metaphorical framework for addressing how literary representation can contribute to understanding events that defy direct experience. Kracauer highlights documentary film's unique capacity to mediate horror, Weiss emphasizes literature's limitations and compensatory strategies through imaginative projection, and Sebald adopts a "Holocaust-in-absence" approach, focusing on survivors' lives to evoke trauma indirectly. The article also notes the continuing relevance of this motif in twenty-first-century works, illustrating evolving ideas about art's role in engaging with historical trauma.